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> If you think you are likely to attract this kind of attention then you might want to carefully consider which side of the Mossad/not-Mossad threat divide you
by derefr 4y ago
> If you think you are likely to attract this kind of attention then you might want to carefully consider which side of the Mossad/not-Mossad threat divide you live on and maybe check your phone isn’t a piece of Uranium.
To be honest, we get something like this kind of attention (Tbps of forged requests / brute-force registration attacks per day), and all we do is provide a free API that's rate-limited per user account for multitenant-QoS reasons. People do all sorts of crazy stuff to try to sneakily drip-register a thousand accounts over several weeks so they can then launch some big job that uses all the keys in tandem to evade the rate limits.
Little do they know, they don't get any benefit from that, even while they're nominally "getting away with it"; doing that just makes our servers fall over! :P
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Separately, you should really consider a level between "Mossad" and "not-Mossad": the sorts of people who hack crypto exchanges. They tend to use exactly the kind of "saw it in a movie"-level techniques that you'd think wouldn't happen because "you can just use rubber-hose cryptanalysis." Except if you're a socially-anxious math-genius fifteen-year-old living in Belarus, and there's a cryptosystem that you have unlimited access to a local copy of, maybe the rubber-hose cryptanalysis is actually harder!
- 323 4y ago> you should really consider a level between "Mossad" and "not-Mossad": the sorts of people who hack crypto exchanges. Bad example, since the biggest crypto hacker is North Korea. > North Korean government-backed hackers have stolen the equivalent of billions of dollars in recent years by raiding cryptocurrency exchanges, according to the United Nations. In some cases, they’ve been able to nab hundreds of millions of dollars in a single heist, the FBI and private investigators say.* https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/10/politics/north-korean-hackers-crypto-currency-firms-infiltrate/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/10/politics/north-korean-hac...
- naet 4y agoI always wonder about these "North Korean" hackers given that I've heard the average North Korean citizen's access to computers (and the outside internet) is extremely limited. Where are they getting these world class hackers from if this is the case? It must be a group of outside parties who use North Korea as a mask and/or employer, right?
- ethbr0 4y agoOr, when you're a quasi-religious dictatorship with strict information control, you just recognize math talent in 1st grade and funnel students into patriotic computer security-specific training. North Korea has been ruled by the Kims for 74 years at this point. A few computers aren't expensive for even a low-wealth country, and math is cheap to teach.
- wrycoder 4y agoA few billion dollars hacked will pay for a lot of nice computers, even after the Kim skim.
- matai_kolila 4y agoDPRK 1%ers get a western education and have normal Internet access. It’s not ideological, it’s practical; get a cybersecurity degree in the states/Europe and live “lavishly” with your family or flee and never see anyone you love again (they don’t kill them they’re just poor and in NK).
- duxup 4y agoDo they need to be world class hackers?
- nequo 4y ago> Where are they getting these world class hackers from if this is the case? The New Yorker ran a piece on this recently-ish[1]: The most promising students are encouraged to use computers at schools. Those who excel at mathematics are placed at specialized high schools. The best students can travel abroad, to compete in such events as the International Mathematical Olympiad. Many winners of the Fields Medal, the celebrated prize in mathematics, placed highly in the contest when they were teen-agers. They cultivate their math talent, and after graduation they offer them jobs in cyber espionage that beat their alternatives by a wide margin. [1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/26/the-incredible-rise-of-north-koreas-hacking-army https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/04/26/the-incredible...
- 4y ago
- matai_kolila 4y agoUh, I doubt many/any of them are “crack a crypto algorithm” sophisticated. These groups know how to buy exploits, attach payloads, and be persistent. Not trivial per se but hardly PhD math stuff…
- tsimionescu 4y agoThey may very well be able to find their own 0-day exploits, which are far more likely to even exist than a "crack a crypto algorithm" method (which often just doesn't exist).
- matai_kolila 4y agoNot the ransomware crews, and def not when you’re pulling in 100mm+, it would lose you money to try…