What's it like to negotiate with ransomware gangs?

https://redtape.substack.com/p/whats-it-really-like-to-negotiate

by headalgorithm • 6 years ago

69 55 6 years ago

redtape.substack.com

TheJoeMan• 6 years ago

You don’t get to negotiate with terrorists, and you shouldn’t get to pay ransoms for your subpar security.

gostsamo• 6 years ago

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice...

Paying ransom is bad, but it is bad for the commons and relieves one from a short-term pain point. Just like pollution, the cost will be paid from someone else later.

C1sc0cat• 6 years ago

Does get you put on the sucker list

ben5092• 6 years ago

As stated, this is a non sequitur; you need to explain your reasoning behind why one thing implies the other.

vincnetas• 6 years ago

You can see this as payment for pen testing. Expensive pen testing, that you could have bought earlier for cheaper and with better status report.

bradleyjg2• 6 years ago

The thing I don’t get about these ransomware attacks is that bitcoin isn’t actually anonymous. On the contrary, it’s highly traceable. So we know what entities (exchanges) are conspiring with these criminals. Why isn’t the FBI going full untouchables on them? Granted if they are in China/Russia there are limits, but even there, we have tools.

drchopchop• 6 years ago

They can wash the coins via converting to alts and back, especially at shady foreign exchanges that don't care about KYC/AML. I don't see how the FBI has any jurisdiction, or even whether this is big enough potatoes for them to devote significant time and resources to.

bradleyjg2• 6 years ago

The US has a lot of tools at its disposal to make life difficult for foreign financial institutions. There’s no legal bar to using them here. I agree that no individual ransomware attack has yet been impactful enough to justify a national response, but cumulatively we are probably there.

gowld5• 6 years ago

Foreign attacks on the US are the jurisdiction of the trillion dollar military.

anaganisk• 6 years ago

Simple there are not meddling with DEA or Hollywood. They're good.

billpg2• 6 years ago

What I don't get is the idea of trusting a criminal to live up to their promises if the victim pays up.

"They would lose a lot of reputation if they broke their side of the deal."

What reputation? Is there some sort of website where I can go read reviews of a ransomware gang? Even if there were, what's stopping the "bad" gangs from pretending to be the "good" ones? Trademarks?

InfiniteRand• 6 years ago

Probably reputation among ransom-ware negotiators (by this I mean the cottage industry described in the original post)

ben5092• 6 years ago

Yup, the expected value of the key is P(valid_key) * savings_from_decrypting. So if you're known to negotiators as providing a valid key, it makes the likelihood of paying higher.

gowld5• 6 years ago

Ransomware "negotiators" are "affiliate salespeople", as I see it.

zorked• 6 years ago

I negotiated for a friend in a small ransomware case. They paid $2k. Yes, reputation is important, I did some research to check whether others had successfully negotiated. If you get a reputation for not delivering nobody will negotiate with you. Likewise if you have a good reputation the amount of money people are willing to risk on getting their data back goes up, and that's good for business. It's also a reason why the ransomware was very clearly branded.

It's criminal but the principles of business still apply.

billpg2• 6 years ago

I may been a bit glib in my original post, but is there actually a website where ransomware gangs reputation are tracked?

leppr• 6 years ago

Even if there were, what's stopping the "bad" gangs from pretending to be the "good" ones? Trademarks?

I have no idea if that is actually done, but the criminals could simply cryptographically sign a unique message for each attack.

vmception• 6 years ago

Although there are incentives, what is really being challenged, for you, is a childish view of a categorization.

Ransomware operators are as trustworthy as any corporation, because they are a corporation.

autosharp2• 6 years ago

Aren't these criminals providing a useful service to society?

Corporations (and the governments that are supposed to set and enforce standards) are clearly failing to protect the data that is collected about people. These criminals are increasing the incentive for corporate data security.

The Equifax case is a good example of the problem. They leaked data on lots of Americans, who never agreed to their data being collected, they externalized an enormous amount of damage they created, and they are still in business. Government is clearly failing here.

I feel safer knowing that there are people out there, hunting down these unsecured caches of data.

hammock• 6 years ago

Aren't these criminals providing a useful service to society?

Maybe if the ransom paid was required to be spent on data security improvements...

emidln• 6 years ago

I feel safer knowing that there are people out there, hunting down these unsecured caches of data.

There's very little difference between maliciously encrypting someone's data once you have managed to establish code execution vs exfiltrating all of the data and then using any PII to open lines of credit.

For you as a consumer, the former doesn't harm you. The later has the ability to harm you quite a bit in ways that take months/years to sort out. Do you really feel safer because the criminals that cracked these systems flipped a coin that landed on the "extort our victim" side rather than the "free leads to customers of our victims" side?

c222• 6 years ago

Yes, that's the point. These organizations holding my PII haven't historically given half a damn if all my data gets exfiltrated or not. By electing to pursue the other side of the coin these attackers provide incentive for those companies to batten down the hatches, causing my PII to become more protected as a side-effect, thus leading to a greater feeling of safety.

nkrisc• 6 years ago

There's three possible outcomes:

1. The victim organization that has my data gets everything encrypted and is forced to pay a ransom. 2. The same happens, but the hackers also release the stolen data, including my PII. 3. The hackers just sell the stolen PII from the start.

As a consumer, I far prefer option 1. Maybe it will teach them to protect their system, and my PII, better.

If my PII is released somehow, well that's what used to happen anyway. So it not happening is an improvement.

inasio• 6 years ago

You could use the same argument for bank robbers.

autosharp2• 6 years ago

Do you see banks getting robbed left and right and banks/governments not caring enough to take action against it? And is it being made your problem or the bank's problem when they do get robbed?

intrasight• 6 years ago

An analogy. Perhaps 20% of modern integrated circuits are dedicated to testing. Perhaps the same percent of GDP is spent combating crime. In a ideal world, we'd not need to waste all that silicon real estate on testing. And in an ideal world, we wouldn't be wasting resource on combating crime. But the world is not ideal.

mikorym4• 6 years ago

One should be careful to confound people's carelessness or complacency with a right to exploit people.

I also don't think the people being ransomwared are the same people who try to weaponise your data, hospitals being a good example.

smrtinsert• 6 years ago

Isn't production data being replicated to backups at a minimum daily? How is ransomware still a thing at big corps in 2020.

unixhero3• 6 years ago

The cancer of our time:

Active directory and domain controllers.

Ransomware is just the attack vector.

At the end of the cyber kill cHain lies AD.

mikorym4• 6 years ago

Could you elaborate?

stu2b50• 6 years ago

Ransomware attacks will often wait after getting into systems, so that they can also encrypt live backups. Air gapped backups from sufficiently long ago will work, but not only is restoring to those usually a pain in the ass, but would also come with significant business cost... which may be more than the ransom. That's the goal, anyway.

choward• 6 years ago

That doesn't protect against them threatening to make all the data public.

sfshaw• 6 years ago

Paying a random is a better user experience than restoring a backup.

lhoff• 6 years ago

roughly half of U.S. corporations report being attacked by ransomware last year.

Holy f..

I knew that is was bad. But that is way worse then i expected.

josefresco• 6 years ago

... based on a survey of "5,000 IT managers"

Source: https://www.sophos.com/en-us/medialibrary/Gated-Assets/white...

croissants• 6 years ago

The exact question is "in the last year, has your organization been hit by ransomware?". It reads a little vague to me -- is a visible unsuccessful attack the same as getting "hit by ransomware"?

mikorym4• 6 years ago

Interesting article, but I would say this is squarely from the perspective of the less technical people involved: lawyers, prosecutors, management types, apart a little bit from Art who knows about the steps in unencryption and so forth—interesting, none the less.

My opinion about it is that many companies don't understand their systems (and yes, I do blame Microsoft, Apple and for that matter Salesforce or Oracle). However, many people don't understand their microwave ovens, myself included, so perhaps it's unrealistic to start that conversation and perhaps focus on the pragmatists, like Art.

kencausey• 6 years ago

Is anyone aware of the implementation of a system where documents are checked out for access, possibly with limitted read only access and only optionally write access? My thought is that documents would then be slotted into categories like unimportant, contains sensitive information, must not be lost and possibly have greater barriers to access based on these criteria.

What's it like to negotiate with ransomware gangs?

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