4 ms·

I wonder how much of a human element is involved in each individual hack. I would have thought the sticky note, encryption, payment & decryption was all automat

I wonder how much of a human element is involved in each individual hack. I would have thought the sticky note, encryption, payment & decryption was all automated.

ljf 5y ago
As I understand it there is often a lot of discourse that takes place between the hacker and the hacked - agreeing prices, haggling, proof of files etc. Yes much can be automated but there is usually a human element to these deals and that costs the hackers money. They also want to be careful to limit their hacks to companies their handlers are happy for them to hack. Go too wide and you risk hitting a company directly or indirectly linked to your state/handler/patron.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  You'd think a GPT3 / GAN could be created to handle much of that. It's a percentages game anyway.
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Why would you want GPT to handle multi million dollar negotiations? Sorta playing into stereotypes about engineers here.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Scale. Perhaps not the largest groups, but the smaller ones, posssibly.
- sho 5y ago
  You are correct. I have had the "pleasure" of going through the negotiation process before. There are even companies that specialise in it, and have DBs on who is a "trusted" threat actor (the industry term) who will actually honor the terms of the transaction or not. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of such deals done every year.
pope_meat 5y ago
That stuff is automated. What's not is managing big sums of money, turning crypto in to a more traditional currency/assets. That side of the operation probably has more people doing leg work than you'd think.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  We really need someone from REvil to do an AMA on HN for this sort of detail. How did they get their first paying "customer"? What's their churn rate? Do they appreciate strong security measures, rendering each lost "sale" somewhat bittersweet? How are they handling the transition from developer-driven startup to a more mature organization?
  - noduerme 5y ago
    More importantly, how long are they on Dogecoin? (Funny post, btw. The whole thing is totally absurd.)
    - ineedasername 5y ago
      I know, and yet I'm only half joking because they probably face some of the same issues as any legitimate tech business. There's plenty of extra issues on top that go with any organized crime-- money laundering, worrying about law enforcement, loyalty of their members and brutal enforcement of it. I really am fascinated by what the structure of this would look like from the inside. Of course much of it depends on the degree to which it may actually be state-sponsored, or just lightly assisted or politely ignored. Now with the added prospect of a powerful country with a vendetta against them. It's even conceivable that if they go too far and political pressure in the US builds high enough, and Russia &/or their countries of residence are also put under pressure, that they could find themselves on the wrong end of a drone strike or no-knock flash-bank assisted rapid entry to homes and business locations. All they have to do is pick the wrong target that directly leads to deaths-- hospitals the most obvious, but industrial accidents or "rapid unplanned disassembly" of something like a chemical plant... I was shocked at the pipeline attack, followed by one on the US's food supply. These rise to the level of terrorism, and when fear & anger become dominant motivating factors the event horizon for any ability to predict what happens will become significantly shorter and less certain. And in the middle of all of that will be a team of techies and support staff struggling to cope with day to day realities of running a thriving organization. There's an IT Crowd satire show somewhere in there that Netflix should consider.

I wonder how much of a human element is involved in each individual hack. I would have thought the sticky note, encryption, payment & decryption was all automated.

ljf 5y ago

As I understand it there is often a lot of discourse that takes place between the hacker and the hacked - agreeing prices, haggling, proof of files etc. Yes much can be automated but there is usually a human element to these deals and that costs the hackers money. They also want to be careful to limit their hacks to companies their handlers are happy for them to hack. Go too wide and you risk hitting a company directly or indirectly linked to your state/handler/patron.

dredmorbius 5y ago
You'd think a GPT3 / GAN could be created to handle much of that. It's a percentages game anyway.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Why would you want GPT to handle multi million dollar negotiations? Sorta playing into stereotypes about engineers here.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Scale. Perhaps not the largest groups, but the smaller ones, posssibly.
sho 5y ago
You are correct. I have had the "pleasure" of going through the negotiation process before. There are even companies that specialise in it, and have DBs on who is a "trusted" threat actor (the industry term) who will actually honor the terms of the transaction or not. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands, of such deals done every year.

pope_meat 5y ago

That stuff is automated. What's not is managing big sums of money, turning crypto in to a more traditional currency/assets. That side of the operation probably has more people doing leg work than you'd think.

ineedasername 5y ago
We really need someone from REvil to do an AMA on HN for this sort of detail. How did they get their first paying "customer"? What's their churn rate? Do they appreciate strong security measures, rendering each lost "sale" somewhat bittersweet? How are they handling the transition from developer-driven startup to a more mature organization?
- noduerme 5y ago
  More importantly, how long are they on Dogecoin? (Funny post, btw. The whole thing is totally absurd.)
  - ineedasername 5y ago
    I know, and yet I'm only half joking because they probably face some of the same issues as any legitimate tech business. There's plenty of extra issues on top that go with any organized crime-- money laundering, worrying about law enforcement, loyalty of their members and brutal enforcement of it. I really am fascinated by what the structure of this would look like from the inside. Of course much of it depends on the degree to which it may actually be state-sponsored, or just lightly assisted or politely ignored. Now with the added prospect of a powerful country with a vendetta against them. It's even conceivable that if they go too far and political pressure in the US builds high enough, and Russia &/or their countries of residence are also put under pressure, that they could find themselves on the wrong end of a drone strike or no-knock flash-bank assisted rapid entry to homes and business locations. All they have to do is pick the wrong target that directly leads to deaths-- hospitals the most obvious, but industrial accidents or "rapid unplanned disassembly" of something like a chemical plant... I was shocked at the pipeline attack, followed by one on the US's food supply. These rise to the level of terrorism, and when fear & anger become dominant motivating factors the event horizon for any ability to predict what happens will become significantly shorter and less certain. And in the middle of all of that will be a team of techies and support staff struggling to cope with day to day realities of running a thriving organization. There's an IT Crowd satire show somewhere in there that Netflix should consider.