3 ms·

It seems appropriate to regurgitate the one about the bear and the hikers.... Two friends are in the woods, having a picnic. They spot a bear running at them.

by abraae 5y ago

It seems appropriate to regurgitate the one about the bear and the hikers.... Two friends are in the woods, having a picnic. They spot a bear running at them. One friend gets up and starts running away from the bear. The other friend opens his backpack, takes out his running shoes, changes out of his hiking boots, and starts stretching. “Are you crazy?” the first friend shouts, looking over his shoulder as the bear closes in on his friend. “You can’t outrun a bear!” “I don’t have to outrun the bear,” said the second friend. “I only have to outrun you.” In our scenario, the bear is the ransomware attackers, and Colonial Pipeline is one of the runners. There are hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands more runners that the bear can go after. You don't need to have perfect security over every aspect of your operation (though you should of course aspire to that). In particular you don't need to give up because in theory someone could infiltrate your offsite backups. You just need to make things hard enough that the ransomware guys will go after an easier target.

Veserv 5y ago
Except that is totally wrong. You are assuming that there is one bear, that you can escape the bear forever, that the bear is not hungry enough to eat everybody, and that the bears are not multiplying ferociously due to nearly unlimited supply of delicious food. No, reality is more like the story of the dodo. A vast quantity of delicious prey that nobody was eating because nobody knew about them. Then they were discovered and some predators showed up but there were not enough to eat all of them. But then more and more predators showed up to exploit the vast untapped resource until they were all eaten. We are still in the middle of that process which is borne out by the fact that the frequency of attacks has been increasing on the order of >100% per year and average demands per attack have been doing something similar. That is an utterly ferocious rate of growth that will soon be enough to attack not just the juiciest targets, but every profitable target in a few years. Being slightly faster or slightly less delicious will not help when there are finally enough bears to eat everybody.

by abraae 5y ago

Veserv 5y ago

Except that is totally wrong. You are assuming that there is one bear, that you can escape the bear forever, that the bear is not hungry enough to eat everybody, and that the bears are not multiplying ferociously due to nearly unlimited supply of delicious food. No, reality is more like the story of the dodo. A vast quantity of delicious prey that nobody was eating because nobody knew about them. Then they were discovered and some predators showed up but there were not enough to eat all of them. But then more and more predators showed up to exploit the vast untapped resource until they were all eaten. We are still in the middle of that process which is borne out by the fact that the frequency of attacks has been increasing on the order of >100% per year and average demands per attack have been doing something similar. That is an utterly ferocious rate of growth that will soon be enough to attack not just the juiciest targets, but every profitable target in a few years. Being slightly faster or slightly less delicious will not help when there are finally enough bears to eat everybody.