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That gang may have bitten off more than they can chew. They've now gotten the US government involved officially, which means that beyond the sheer mass of resou
by tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
That gang may have bitten off more than they can chew. They've now gotten the US government involved officially, which means that beyond the sheer mass of resources that will go into tracking this gang, the government also has something to prove now.
Being at the center of an international incident is probably not good for business.
- op03 6y agoThe US Govt is fit for nothing beyond setting up social media offices these days.
- ackbar03 6y agoLol this was my first reaction as well, they now have a nation-state on their ass. But that being said its not impossible that this was just a cover for a Russian state-sponsored attempt on US infra
- peteretep 6y ago"nation-state" is not just a fancy infosec word for country, and there's some debate as to whether the USA constitutes an actual nation state, rather than a state.
- maxqin1 6y ago> A nation state is a state in which a great majority shares the same culture and is conscious of it. It has been described as a political unit where the state and nation are congruent. It is a more precise concept than "country", since a country does not need to have a predominant ethnic group. [1] Interesting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state
- solipsism 6y agonation-state" is not just a fancy infosec word for country, This is pedantic and adds no value. In what sense could the precise definition of "nation state" matter? in this context everyone understands the phrase in exactly the way it's meant -- a resourceful national government.
- Siira 6y ago:thums-up: Some people can’t stop fighting “blasphemy,” even if they aren’t in a classic religion.
- l33t2328 6y agoThe USA is absolutely a nation state. Cocal-cola, mcdonalds, Christmas, enlgish, etc. are well dispersed throughout the entire population. We have a uniform culture, although not as uniform as much smaller countries, but uniform nonetheless.
- londons_explore 6y agoArguably the "nation" of the USA extends into England, Australia, Israel and a few other places which have taken a lot of the culture.
- reducesuffering 6y ago> Cocal-cola, mcdonalds, Christmas, english These are well dispersed throughout the world...
- throwaway316943 6y agoCultural dominance isn’t an argument against national cohesion.
- pjc50 6y agoWe regret to inform you that language is mutable.
- ehnto 6y agoNow introducing, TypeLang! A strictly typed spoken language with core emotional concepts built into the standard library and immutablity as default. Easily transpiled into dozens of different languages, such as English, Japanese, JavaScript, and Smooth Jazz.
- 7952 6y agoWe really need SI units for emotions. Something that can be based on reproducible observations.
- anticensor 6y agoA megasophia of wisdom.
- zie 6y agosee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto not exactly what you are looking for, but :) Also French has an official body that authorizes words.
- vkou 6y agoYes, because the Russian state has nothing better to do then inconvenience the operation of a foreign fuel pipeline for a few days.
- that_guy_iain 6y agoRussia and China have been suspected of doing things like this for years. And who says it's just to inconvenience them? There will other things happening because of this and this could impact other nations in a postive manner.
- vkou 6y ago> Russia and China have been suspected of doing things like this for years. By who? People who never provide evidence for their claims? > There will other things happening because of this and this could impact other nations in a postive manner. While it's certainly possible that the FSB is playing 59-dimensional chess, here, hoping for a true butterfly-effect sequence of causality, I think the onus is on you to demonstrate that.
- that_guy_iain 6y ago> By who? People who never provide evidence for their claims? By lots of countreies. The US charged 4 chinese military officers for hacking Equifax. > While it's certainly possible that the FSB is playing 59-dimensional chess, here, hoping for a true butterfly-effect sequence of causality, I think the onus is on you to demonstrate that. You seem to think that it would require multiple things to fall into place to benefit a foreign country. Say you want to manipulate the price of the fuel. Increasing the costs of transport would do that.
- vkou 6y agoHacking Equifax[1] makes sense, because it directly useful for intelligence work. Find people of interest who have credit problems, and lean on them. [2] This isn't even a blip on the radar of global fuel prices. It is completely lost in the noise. [3] [1] Or the OPM, since it was kind enough to have lists of 'all spies operating abroad' on its intranet. Whoops. [2] I mean, you could also just pose as a landlord or employer, and ask for credit checks on them, it costs ~$30 per query, but it is what it is. [3] If the FSB really wants to increase demand for fuel, they should try stalling a junker or two on an interstate bridge... Imagine the fuel wasted from all the cars idling, or taking detours!
- Arcturis 6y agoIf I were running the Russian hacking center in charge of pwning US infrastructure, I'd be pissed as hell. This is like getting vaccinated -- all of a sudden we're going to take this seriously and patch a bunch of exploits that they've had ready to go.
- murph-almighty 6y agoMaybe this gang doesn't need to worry about the US going after it, it needs to worry about the FSB going after it for screwing up its game plan...
- slickrick216 6y agoThird administration in a row to do nothing. Read sandworm. The wolf is in the hen house now and nothing will still be done.
- wolverine876 6y ago> That gang ... Maybe it's another government, trying to sow chaos, disrupt markets, test US response capabilities, etc.
- nostoc 6y agoCould be, but ransomware gangs are a dime a dozen, and many are simply financialy motivated. It's just a very profitable business model.
- jcadam 6y agoThis was a very stupid thing to do, if it was a ransomware gang.
- pasquinelli 6y agomaybe it's the CIA, trying to increase hostilities between the united states and some other country.
- zucker42 6y agoDoesn't every cyberattack get attention from the U.S. government? After all, carrying out a cyberattack is a federal crime.
- adventured 6y agoHow could it? There are thousands of cyberattacks against US companies and infrastructure every day. There are cyberattacks and then there's going after the most important domestic energy line of a superpower. This is quite different from your run of the mill cyberattack, they're not all created equal.
- pm90 6y agoThis is exactly right. It all depends on the attention these attacks get. Now that they've had a tangible effect on the news cycle, creating concern about the safety of US energy infrastructure, there will be more incentives for the Government to hunt them down and get credit for doing so. I think I read somewhere that China based attackers have already penetrated networks of major US infrastructure systems but didn't do anything because whats the point of wrecking havoc now? Better wait for more opportune times. Which also seems to indicate that this may not be a Nation State... they would be after a bigger prize than some bitcoins.
- BuyMyBitcoins 6y agoYes, in the sense that it gets reported to law enforcement and investigative agencies. Without being specific, I was a victim of identity theft and cybercrime. My incident was “reported to the FBI” but I’ve literally never heard anything back from them. In practical terms there needs to be something special about the cyberattack for the government to devote any resources towards it.
- mac01021 6y agoI'm not super-knowledgable about cybersecurity, but shouldn't simply using TOR make it nearly impossible for the US government to track them down? If they want to go overkill, they can additionally use a public VPN account purchased using walmart giftcards bought on ebay using a stolen identity and then mailed overseas. They can also perform the hack using a brand new computer that they never use again afterward. It just seems to me like the attacker has most of the advantage here if they know what they're doing.
- KMag 6y ago> I'm not super-knowledgable about cybersecurity, but shouldn't simply using TOR make it nearly impossible for the US government to track them down? PSA: There are known traffic correlation attacks against Tor. It's not magic security dust you can sprinkle on a system. If you're doing thoughtcrimes, assume any G10 intelligence service can track you down. (If you're into extortion, human trafficking/exploiting children, or financing/advocating violence against civilians, then Tor is totally magic and is 100% guaranteed to make you invincible. Tor is all you need a-hole.) Tor intentionally makes latency-privacy tradeoffs to make web browsing usable. I'm not familiar enough with Tor internals, but I believe applications have no control over these tradeoffs. Anyone know if I2P allows applications to adjust latency/privacy tradeoffs? (Conceptually, you want your store-and-forward mixnet to use a priority queue for each hop, setting a deadline when each message arrives, and filling the pipe with expired messages first, and then non-expired messages in uniform random order. Applications more tolerant of latency get their traffic spread over a longer window. Per-hop latency targets should allow applications to avoid hop-to-hop correlations in latency targets.)
- throwawayboise 6y agoI don't know much about TOR but recall reading speculation that the NSA operates a majority of the exit nodes.
- robert_foss 6y agoYes, you can pick tunnel length in I2P.
- shi_tty 6y agoThat almost sounded like a hollywood like prologue. Nothing interesting, nothing the average joe doesn't know, just your fantasies. Good
- christophilus 6y agoWhen you said “the gang”, I had an image of the gang from “It’s Always Sunny” writing their first virus and this being the result. I’d watch that episode.
- wussboy 6y agoWhen the Feds catch up to them, Dennis and Mac are loading frozen beef in to the back of his car and are legitimately confused by what the cops are saying. They moved past the virus several weeks ago and have had literally dozens of plans since then.
- stuffbyspencer 6y agoAnd then Charlie walks out and goes "Ooooh, uh oh, uh yeah, guys you know what... I think I know what they mean. Last week when everyone was talking about the virus, I had just watch this really cool cyber hacking movie on TV last night, so I kinda zoned out and didn't know what our next scheme was, so when I went home I paid someone on the darkweb for a virus just like in that movie-" Dennis: "How the hell do you have money to pay people on the darkweb Charlie?" Charlie: "KittenCoin" Dennis: "Oh god dammit, KittenCoin? You did that huh? Alright, checks out. Anyways, so then what happened?" Charlie: "Well then I didn't really know what we were doing still, so I just emailed the file the russian kid sent me to your email, but I totally messed up the address cause my fingers were all sticky with peanut butter at this point and-" Dennis: "WHY WERE YOUR- You know what, not only do I not wanna know, but I'm also gonna take a stab at how this story ends. Charlie, are you telling me you made a scam cryptocurrency and then used the profits to pay some sketchy russian hacker for a ransomware virus which you then emailed to a random address with a subject line something along the lines of "FOR FRIEND, IMPORTANT FILE, FOR PLAN, GIVES MONEY", which obviously enticed the random receiver to open said email promptly starting a massive email worm that managed to spread its way into the government's oil pipelines?" Charlie: "That's... Uh, yeah, yup, yup, that's pretty much spot on dude, I'm pretty sure."
- rchaud 6y agoThe Gang "Solves" the Gas Crisis (2021)