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Would this result in not paying or them hiring consultants who pay on their behalf and just invoice them for "resolution services"?
by MattGaiser 5y ago
Would this result in not paying or them hiring consultants who pay on their behalf and just invoice them for "resolution services"?
- willcipriano 5y agoIt's illegal to fund terrorism, I don't think paying someone to fund terrorism is a defence in a court of law.
- throwawaygh 5y agoWriting a law that prevents this sort of pass-through is trivial. Hold all parties responsible. Don't even require first-hand knowledge that a ransom was paid. Writing a law with proper disincentives is also trivial -- forget about fines. Proper jail time for senior execs and board members. Execs and boards will be damn sure not to pay ransoms, and additionally damn sure that any company they hire to help knows in no uncertain terms that they are also not to pay any ransoms. It really isn't that hard to write laws that disincentivize paying ransoms and aren't possible to route around with wink-and-nod bullshit.
- strogonoff 5y agoLaws that disincentive paying ransoms don’t seem to necessarily be that simple to implement and uphold, at least as long as cryptocurrencies are in the equation. Someone may have paid into that wallet, but who? Was it the attackers themselves, to make it seem to observers as if they succeeded? Did some consultant happen to keep a stash of crypto? Maybe the boss of the hacked organization wisely maintained a wallet for that purpose, funded by embezzling?
- kwhitefoot 5y agoPresumably someone had to buy the cryptocurrency in the first place so that should be traceable.
- strogonoff 5y agoOne might not need to buy cryptocurrency all at once after the hack nor do it with visible corporate money, CEO can own a crypto wallet not connected to them in any way, there are mixers/anonymizers, etc. The range of possibilities is much broader in that land.
- throwawaygh 5y agoThis is a great example of technologists underestimating the law. Juries, judges, and legislators are not complete dumbasses.
- whimsicalism 5y agoI wonder where this pop-understanding of the law that seems prevalent on HN comes from. Loopholes exist, but in general the government is not terrible at figuring out basic schemes like this and adapt administration of the law.
- dharmab 5y agoI think a lot of the HN crowd think of laws like computer code- that it needs to be very exact. Most laws are fairly generalized with broad coverage, and the cases where they're not tend to be the exception, not the rule.
- PopePompus 5y agoThe law is like 100,000 lines of pseudo-code written by a humanities major who never took a CS class.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- wearywanderer 5y agoLibertarians have substantial, though I think not majority, representation on HN. Certain themes always seem to repeat that seem related to this. For instance, likening any form of prohibition to the failed prohibition of alcohol to suggest that all forms of prohibition are similarly doomed. This argument relies on the reader neglecting to consider the myriad of prohibitions that are going well, like CFC bans or the prohibition on building unsafe firetrap buildings. They point out one failure and ask us to extrapolate from only that datapoint, ignoring the rest. As in this case, pointing out a hypothetical way a law could fail, to insinuate that all laws would fail.
- lmm 5y agoIt comes from watching Law & Order, and from decades of (elected) prosecutors painting important constitutional protections as trivial loopholes.