Tally of Cyber Extortion Attacks on Tech Companies Grows

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/19/tally-of-cyber-extortion-attacks-on-tech-companies-grows/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

by mantraxC • 12 years ago

36 42 12 years ago

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

mantraxC2• 12 years ago

I posted this because I found it of particular interest that the blackmailers ask for payment in Bitcoin.

It makes you think if Bitcoin is turning into a giant example of "be careful what you wish for".

We have exchange after exchange get hacked and legit Bitcoin users losing their money, and now Bitcoin enables extortion schemes that couldn't work so effortlessly before.

Where is this going?

Tloewald• 12 years ago

Bitcoin — assuming it works — also becomes the perfect currency for kidnappers and blackmailers. Awesome, huh?

thinggowrrong• 12 years ago

yup, we can't have the cake and eat it too. we have to learn how to minimize risks and keeping bitcoin alive

jgrowl• 12 years ago

You mean like straight cash has been up until now?

bunderbunder• 12 years ago

Where is this going?

Not far's my guess. If BTC gets too popular as a tool for extortion and money laundering, then the authorities in developed countries are going to start carefully monitoring people who sell large quantities of BTC for sovereign currency or commodities. It would just be another part of their general efforts to combat organized crime. That would make major speculators feel less welcome. If major speculators decide to take their ball and go play somewhere else, the price of BTC will probably tank. That'll discourage everyone else. At which point BTC becomes a terrible medium for money laundering because nobody wants to buy them. I also suspect that the relative anonymity of any one transaction is closely related to overall transaction volume in the BTC economy.

dublinben• 12 years ago

These organizations aren't in developed countries, so their potential cash-outs wouldn't be noticed. Going forward, I would expect even more of the expenses of running an online criminal operation to be payable in BTC, so you wouldn't even need to convert it.

Shinkei2• 12 years ago

Bitcoin is only pseudoanonymous. At some point, the 'bad actor' has to access 'legitimate' banking institutions to exchange the Bitcoins to fiat and that is the weakest link. It requires reporting to relevant tax or other authorities based on arbitrary (and secret) amounts, but targets money laundering, drug trade, gamlbing, etc.

I suppose if I had to throw a potentially disruptive idea out there, you could create a database of 'blacklisted addresses.' Let's say when Bitlocker came out, you entered that address into a database and it was verified as being associated with this scam, well it is trivial to track those coins between addresses and every address it enters is blacklisted until it enters a mixer or exchange, at which point you have a potentially complicit corporation that you could actually target with the subpoena or other legal action for discovery of IPs, login, etc.

dsl2• 12 years ago

People have suggested this before. A bad actor then just takes 100 illicit bitcoins and sprinkles them in random amounts across many addresses, 11 to himself at another address, 6 to a non-profit, and 14 to you. You are now indistinguishable from the bad guy.

mantraxC2• 12 years ago

"At some point, the 'bad actor' has to access 'legitimate' banking institutions to exchange the Bitcoins to fiat and that is the weakest link."

And on the contrary they can do the exchange in, say, Nigeria. So Bitcoin's weakest link is also the law enforcement weakest link, because no one has authority over the entire world, and there are plenty of spots where you can do the exchange without trace.

codeddesign• 12 years ago

i dont get it...why not just switch your dns to cloudflare or a similiar service and run under their protection?

_up• 12 years ago

Feedly did that and was down anyway. Though im interested what they did to stop it.

joncameron• 12 years ago

Right there in the article... Moz signed up with CloudFlare "but Mr. Skinner said the attacker has found new ways to attack their systems."

Does anyone know what that might be? There are quite a few people on HN who have zero sympathy for DDoS victims who don't pony up for Cloudflare etc., but I'm curious about situations when that isn't going to help or other attack vectors that will get you regardless.

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

The underlying hosting that CloudFlare proxies to can be attacked, for one.

liveoneggs• 12 years ago

Maybe your origin has been discovered already.

opendais• 12 years ago

If you have MX records on a cloudflare enabled domain you have to expose the Ip address of your mail server:

https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168536-W...

If that is in the same DC as the rest of your equipment [or worse, the same server] it might be still possible to figure things out and DDoS you.

The underlying hosting is just as vulnerable w/ or w/o Cloudflare.

Last week someone spinning up their own botnet threw like 1Gbps at a side project of mine via UDP at the mail server.

dsl2• 12 years ago

Because centralization is bad for the internet. CloudFlare unwraps every single SSL connection, they see every cookie, they can modify every response. It is a goldmine for a bad actor to compromise.

existencebox• 12 years ago

I'd love to see every market segment have its share of competition, but at this point, cloudflare comes pretty close to "doing magic" in terms of dealing with the increasing volume of DDOS, and I frankly don't know anyone else who offers the services or results they do. (my only connection to them is that they've pulled a few sites I follow out of the fire over the last few months, and getting to see the before/after more firsthand convinced me a bit more of their importance.)

Basically, I'd rather there is _some_ company that can shut down these exiting known bad actors than avoid it on the off chance that it becomes a bad actor down the road. Better to use the time that buys us to look for better ways to deal with DDOS, both policy and tech based, as other comments suggest.

baudehlo2• 12 years ago

And one that resulted in a full shut down: http://www.codespaces.com/

shiven2• 12 years ago

Looking at the armchair post-mortems on HN, they had it coming, one way or another. Putting your only backups the same place you host your full product? Priceless foolhardiness!

baudehlo2• 12 years ago

Tough call. S3 is supposed to have 99.999999999 (or whatever) reliability (not uptime, just storage reliability). It's hard to justify backing up to somewhere else when they give you that figure.

nitrogen2• 12 years ago

DDoS attacks like this wouldn't be so easy if governments actively fixed backdoors in hardware and software instead of creating and stockpiling them. Much harder to build a botnet if there are fewer vulnerable systems to recruit via exploits.

mpyne3• 12 years ago

DDoS attacks like this wouldn't be so easy if governments actively fixed backdoors in hardware and software instead of creating and stockpiling them.

The same thing keeping government from regulating the Internet is the same thing keeping government from simultaneously fixing every flaw in every router, switch, and TCP/IP stack.

Stockpiling has nothing to do with it by itself, as they are stockpiling individual numbers of bugs in an entire frothing sea of bugs. NSA didn't even know about Heartbleed, and that's one that could have enormously aided NSA in doing what they do.

NotAtWork2• 12 years ago

NSA didn't even know about Heartbleed

Source?

jgrahamc• 12 years ago

A. I don't see how "the government" is behind botnets.

B. You don't need many machines to create DDoS attacks because of reflection/amplification.

C. You can rent machines without having to use a botnet.

nitrogen2• 12 years ago

A. I never said the government was "behind botnets." Nor did I refer to any singular government. Yet, Stuxnet did create, in effect, a botnet.

B. A government interested in network security would inform managers of reflection- and amplification-vulnerable systems (such as misconfigured DNS resolvers), as well as design and release open, verifiable, trustable specifications for filtering hardware and packet matching algorithms to block DDoS attacks at the same points they currently tap network traffic.

C. Rented machines can be shut down far more easily than a botnet.

graylights• 12 years ago

So the governments are responsible for every bug now? I'm not so quick to absolve guilt from shitty development. There are many developers that take a lot of shortcuts, with hardcoded passwords and the like.

If we were talking a handful of bugs, your argument would make sense. But we're talking about tens of thousands.

at-fates-hands• 12 years ago

>> There are many developers that take a lot of shortcuts, with hardcoded passwords and the like.

This.

Last year worked at a huge, multinational,privately held company. After being at my job less than two days, I found out they store all of their server passwords in plaintext, on the server, together, in one file.

It took me about an hour to compose myself. It was like having a dream where you come to work and you suddenly realize you left your pants at home.

microcolonel2• 12 years ago

Anyone want to start a registry of threatening bitcoin addresses, so we can prevent funds from these transactions from being used? (aside from paying other organized criminals)

_delirium• 12 years ago

Isn't that difficult to enforce, unless you also blacklist the public mixers? It's easy to launder moderate amounts of Bitcoins through the mixers, after which blacklisting the original wallets would no longer impede the money being spent. Though if the major mixers were willing to go along with such a blacklist it'd get considerably more effective.

microcolonel2• 12 years ago

You can track the amount through the transaction logs though, and mixers don't want to get stuck with bitcoins which will eventually be invalidated by other parts of the ecosystem.

Not a perfect idea at this point though, it'd require considerable organization to get this done, certainly better than throwing away Bitcoin or waiting for it to become criminalized. IMHO

jqm• 12 years ago

It's amazing to me that people would screw around with this for 2 or 3 hundred dollars.

I realize wages are low in many parts of the world and this might represent a significant amount of money, but anyone with access to the resources and possessing the technological know how, to pull this off maybe could make that in a legitimate way.

I have no idea, but maybe state actors are involved. Maybe it is a low level warning of what "could" be done. Probably not... but maybe. $300 doesn't seem like it would be worth the trouble and risk but maybe it is.

troels2• 12 years ago

One thing I don't quite understand - wouldn't it be possible to unravel a botnet? If you acquire one of the infected machines, a bit of reverse engineering (or perhaps just monitoring its network traffic) should presumably be able to reveal where it gets instructions from. It would probably take the cooperation of law enforcement, but assuming that, wouldn't it be possible - even practical - to do?

Mandatum• 12 years ago

Yes, in the past when they were more centralized with only a few IRC/C&C's this was an easy solution.

However now, a botmaster is able to generate thousands of C&C centers's from hacked boxes, via hidden TOR or I2P nodes, or shared hosting, as well as hundreds of thousands of varying infected malware almost instantly. The only thing that requires effort from the botmaster now is spreading and constantly updating their slaves so they can keep them in control longer.

The actual implementation is the easy part of it.

troels2• 12 years ago

I see. Still, the attacker has multiple surfaces to try and trace them through. Unless they are very careful, you would expect that they tend to slip every now and then, making it possible to find them? I would imagine that a dedicated security team within law enforcement would be able to get a pretty good success rate, but that doesn't appear to be the case?

Tally of Cyber Extortion Attacks on Tech Companies Grows

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