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American Radio Relay League paid $1M ransom payment
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tjwds 2y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41324905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41324905
- rexreed 2y agoCan someone explain why offsite, offline, multi-timescale backups don't help in these cases?
- wkat4242 2y agoWow they have that kind of money?? All the ham radio clubs I've been with have been living hand to mouth lol. Always having to beg everyone for money if something big needed doing. Sad though that they wasted it on rewarding cybercrime actors.
- doe_eyes 2y agoTheir insurer paid most of it.
- whartung 2y agoWhich brings up the other topic. Is the insurance cheaper than the impact and costs of preventing it in the first place?
- nickdurfe 2y agoThe article states that their insurance paid the ransom.
- kotaKat 2y agoOver $32m in investments sitting in ARRL's coffers. No wonder they figured they could go for broke on a ransom demand and hope for the payout. https://www.arrl.org/files/file/About%20ARRL/Annual%20Reports/2022%20Annual%20Report%20ARRL%20AR2022%20072023C.pdf https://www.arrl.org/files/file/About%20ARRL/Annual%20Report... - pg 44(ish)
- redog 2y agoIf statistics are to be believed they're going to get a nother wave or few
- wmf 2y agoSale of Amateur Radio AMPRnet TCP/IP Addresses Raised $108 million https://nediv.arrl.org/2020/10/12/sale-of-amateur-radio-amprnet-tcp-ip-addresses-raised-108-million/ https://nediv.arrl.org/2020/10/12/sale-of-amateur-radio-ampr... I don't know how much went to ARRL.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Jtsummers 2y agoDifferent organizations. ARRL has received grants from ARDC thanks to that money, though.
- _JamesA_ 2y agoTechnical debt has to be paid one way or the other.
- KyleBerezin 2y agoWould it be crazy to make paying crypto ransoms a crime? I feel like it would help the situation, but I'm sure there is something I am overlooking.
- chrisfosterelli 2y agoPaying the ransom is already illegal in a lot of conditions and interpretations but I don't think it's ever actually been enforced.
- thinkingemote 2y agoSeems like many agree it could help, but many think that it might hurt too in other ways. In the UK it's not illegal Ransomware: Should paying hacker ransoms be illegal? (2021) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57173096 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-57173096
- bparsons 2y agoIt creates additional conditions for blackmail of the target. Some would pay, and then could be induced into future payments because they can now be leveraged for having committed a criminal offense. A better law would be one that requires institutions above a certain size to create backups every 24hrs and maintain basic security practices to prevent this sort of thing.
- andrewla 2y agoBetter? I guess there are two ways you could implement this, the legal and the regulatory route. The legal route would say that upon discovery of the lack of said backups, they would be subject to penalties. So if they get hit by a ransomeware attack, then while they are down, they get kicked. Pretty rough. The regulatory route would say that every company above a certain size needs to document its policies around backups, and either standardize on a fixed set of backup techniques or have an auditor that verifies that the backup technique used by a company satisfies some set of requirements. The former approach means a ton of paperwork for the company to get the certification, and the latter approach means that the regulatory body has to be very large and have a great deal of subject matter expertise. All of this is fairly horrible. I'm not sure that either of these would be "better" than making the payments themselves illegal. Not to say that such a law would be "good" either -- it basically means that companies will have to not involve the authorities because recovering their data is more important (and may be essential to the continuity of the company). Bad as it is, the best solution here is probably to keep going like we're going -- law enforcement will try to hunt down the ransomers and bring them to justice (since this is already illegal), companies are incentivized to follow some sort of best practices around backups.
- teqsun 2y agoIs this standard? From my layman perspective, I would never pay a ransom because I can't see any possible assurance that they'll actually honor their end and/or quietly tampered/backdoored for future exploitation. Is there a BBB for ransomware hackers that informs the insurance whether the deal will be honored?
- luma 2y agoTrust is established through interaction with the ransoming party. The interaction will be some version of a trial solution that will decrypt some subset of the locked systems to prove that they can in fact recover your systems. I've been engaged on a few of these, my general impression so far is that the technical support you get from the ransomware gangs is better than the contracted support I get from Microsoft.
- jMyles 2y ago> better than the contracted support I get from Microsoft. ...that's a pretty low bar. It seems to me that they'd have to be quite reliable and responsive to be able to routinely collect.
- stackskipton 2y ago>It seems to me that they'd have to be quite reliable and responsive to be able to routinely collect. Nope, they rely on compliance to collect. So many compliance/regulatory schemes are like "Do you have vendor support on all your software, including OSes?" so you end up paying Microsoft money or paying Red Hat money.
- jMyles 2y agoSorry; I was unclear. I meant that the ransomware admins need to be reliable and responsive.
- accrual 2y agoIs Microsoft's B2B support really that bad? I've never directly interacted with them, but from what I've heard within my org, they are at least fairly responsive and helpful when you're paying them millions for software.