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Any laser beam eyed mofos wanna defend bitcoin denominated HSE ransomware attack?

bankboucy

Any laser beam eyed mofos wanna defend bitcoin...in the context of a Bitcoin denominated HSE ransomware attack in the middle of pandemic? Oh and the Colonial Pipeline bitcoin attack sending the southern eastern United States into a state of emergency too.

Bitcoin definitely solved the 'oh **** how am I gonna get paid a ransom anonymously and not get caught' problem....and before laser beamed eyed mofos say cash....some laser beamed eyed mofo needs to pick it up from somewhere and then hide it & then wash it & hope nobody sees or finds the cash while its being washed/carried around.

I'll leave recent May 3rd 2021 Charlie Munger quote here too (prior to Colonial Pipeline & HSE cyber attacks) he said on Bitcoin at Berkshire AGM - Bitcoin is "disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization. I don’t welcome a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists and so forth"

I'd also say that some of your laser beamed eyed ransomware friends went and f*cked it up for the rest of you.......the US/EU is coming down hard on cypto......ya'll should google Minsky moment.....its coming.

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Dr Bolouswki

We shoulda just stuck to paper. It's technologies fault.

fritzelly

Should have stuck with exchanging a sheep for a new wife is all I'll say

[Deleted User]

fritzelly wrote: »

Should have stuck with exchanging a sheep for a new wife is all I'll say

Don't bring Roscommon into this!

[Deleted User]

I think you should be angry at file system encryption as it is the actual requirement for these attacks. You can do this without cryptocurrency.

harmless

Cryptography currency asked as ransom for systems that should have used cryptography to protect themselves. :pac::pac::pac:

bankboucy

The standard Bitcoin has nothing to do with these crimes arguments I've heard before......guns dont kill people, people kill people argument....I got it. Heard it before. Yawn.

Bitcoin definitely solved one use case the 'oh **** how am I gonna get paid a ransom anonymously, remotely and not get caught' problem....and I expected laser beamed eyed mofos to say "what about cash" its the same, you blaming email too, computers, phones...dont blame the mechanism of exchange for criminals, blame the criminals....only problem is some laser beamed eyed mofo needs to pick cash up from somewhere physically and then carry it, hide it, launder it & hope nobody sees or finds the cash while its being washed/carried around. Hope nobody rats them out. The risk/reward for criminals is completely skewed by the invention/propagation of bitcoin. It is not as you claim it to be simply a mechanism/inanimate object misused inside of a crime.....it is rather an enhancer/enabler of crime - a superior technology for the carrying out of crime while being the very object/the motivation for the crime itself. No?

My one question my laser eyed friends - your wife/child/partner is kidnapped....you pay a ransom.....but they murder them anyway to protect their own identify.......you desperately hope to bring the killers to justice.......in order of ranking which transaction method (cash, bitcoin, wire/ach) provides the greatest probability that that will NEVER happen?

I'll take the test for you the highest probability of complete escape for criminals from prosecution is as follows:

(1) Bitcoin

(2) Cash

(3) Bank Wire

How do I know - the two big global crimes of the last 7 days are denominated in bitcoin.....

Bitcoin clearly has a causation effect on increasing fraud, kidnapping, extortion, ransomware.......how could it not........it increases the probability criminals will get away with it.....it removes a deterrent, reduces barriers to entry. To argue this isnt true in a week the southeastern United States was nearly brought to a standstill and a whole countries medical system was taken offline in the middle of a pandemic......with bitcoin both the key enabling technology & the medium of exchange AND item of value itself at the heart of the scheme is some feet of mental gymnastics. Who's bread I eat, his song I sing.....i guess.....presume you've all made some money on BTC/cypto recently? You little red eyed devils. And before you see my other posts I hold shares of BOI....legacy finance brah

....but I've held this view for a long time way before I bought BOI shares last year. Bitcoin isnt a threat to banks......its a threat to a civil society....as evidenced this week I guess. No?

And sorry before you come back and say again - well they used email to send the ransom note, text messages, file encryption..blame them too........so you going to blame the invention of email??? mobile phones? text messages? THE VERY INTERNET itself? &#55357;&#56837; I see how these conversations go in the past........

No I'm not going to say that or agree with your nonsense argument...............none of those things are the very motivation for the crime, the object of desire so to speak - they are different.........the crime is perpetrated to extract value itself......bitcoin sits at the very heart of the crime, it is the thing of value.....it is the vehicle that contains the reward for the crime.....it is not email, it is not the internet, it is not file encryption..... it is the thing of value (twinned with the enhanced probability of evasion embedded in its value) and so sits at the very heart of the crime itself.

My bet if you choose to accept it ...................is that Uncle Joe B and the European Union agrees with me more than you guys and your going to see some VERY VERY aggressive moves by the (SEC, DoJ, Fed, ECB, ESME) to purge BTC/crypto on ramps / off ramps in the next twelve months with a corresponding fall in BTC's value of greater than 50% from its 52 week high ~$64k............I will bet someone here..........a quarter of million.......satoshis &#55357;&#56898; .......to be delivered to your BTC wallets by May 15th 2022 if I'm wrong? Deal to the first person to take me up?

[Deleted User]

Are you also angry at fiat currency as it is has facilitated all crime since forever?

[Deleted User]

I think this thread needs more mentions of laser eyes.

frag420

So where does one buy these MOFO coins OP??:pac::D

NomadicGray

Deleted User wrote: »

I think this thread needs more mentions of laser eyes.

I think it needs more reports for trolling

[Deleted User]

NomadicGray wrote: »

I think it needs more reports for trolling

Surely criticism is allowed.

If this keeps up all crypto will be legislated against.

Graham

fvp4 wrote: »

Surely criticism is allowed.

Criticism of 'laser beamed eyed mofos'?

Or criticism of 'a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists' which is pretty much every currency that ever existed.

NomadicGray

fvp4 wrote: »

Surely criticism is allowed.

If this keeps up all crypto will be legislated against.

Its the approach, not the subject matter

banie01

It's not untraceable, if anything it's far mare traceable than cash, precious metals or other stores of wealth.
It does facilitate easy transfer of large volume of wealth in a manner that cannot be recalled.

Blaming bitcoin for criminals hacking a system?
Is akin to blaming rape victims for wearing a short skirt.
It isn't the victim's fault they were attacked, nor is it bitcoin's fault that criminal's attacked the HSE.

The OP has a compelling lack of critical thinking combined with BuzzFeed style reporting.
Stoke up the outrage and facts be damned!

The irony of blaming a cryptographic based proof of work currency, for the lack of cryptographic security enabled by the HSE?
Likely the largest repository of personal and extremely private information in the country?
Would be laughable if it wasn't so stupid!

The whole OP strongly implies that it's the users of crypto that are responsible for the HSE's predicament.
We hacked their systems, we are holding them to ransom and sure who knows...
Some of us may even be profiting

The thing is, most users of crypto currency would be very mindful of the security risks and would and do happily shout security from the rooftops.

1 thing that I am impressed with on the HSE side of this fiasco.
Is that after the last ransomware attacks, there seems to have been serious resilience measures undertaken.
The rapid recovery of many systems to date, would indicate air-gapped storage for back ups and that's a good thing.

Add a bit of server side security and things could be even better.

degsie

Of course everybody brushes over the fact that the computer systems were somehow compromised in the first place.

dougal0691

degsie wrote: »

Of course everybody brushes over the fact that the computer systems were somehow compromised in the first place.

computers are the problem, they make it far too easy to carry out ransomeare attacks and are too anonymous. if everything was on paper the attackers would have to physically steal the files and don't even get me started on having to try and hide millions of paper files, nightmare, be caught in no time. so can any of you laser beam eyed MOFOS tell me why computers shouldn't be banned.

[Deleted User]

I personally blame the hackers for this attack, but regardless crypto acolytes cannot ignore the enormously nefarious use case of money laundering. I can only speak for myself (and a lot of friends) but I got into crypto to buy drugs on the internet with bitcoin.

FFVII

Bottomless pit of tax payer money and the HSE couldn't keep their windows XP updated.

FFVII

Off the shelf ransomware that copies everything. If HSE don't pay then publish it all. What then? Time for top guy to go, job well done. 250,000 pension well earned.

Colonial paying up made this so much worse aswell.

Return on investment is massive.

AtticusFinch86

[Deleted User] wrote: »

I personally blame the hackers for this attack, but regardless crypto acolytes cannot ignore the enormously nefarious use case of money laundering. I can only speak for myself (and a lot of friends) but I got into crypto to buy drugs on the internet with bitcoin.

Nor can you ignore the far more nefarious industry that supplied you (and your friends), with drugs. That industry literally murders thousands annually and has destroyed cities and lives.

pioneerpro

bankboucy wrote: »

I'll take the test for you the highest probability of complete escape for criminals from prosecution is as follows:

(1) Bitcoin

(2) Cash

(3) Bank Wire

Cash without a shadow of a doubt. Proven by the removal of the €500 note from circulation and the HSBC scandal, whereby they avoided US money laundering charges because of 'market risk' fears

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-36768140

Or the 12bn in shrinkwrapped 100$ bills that the US Army flew to Iraq and then eh... lost.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/08/usa.iraq1

Or the fact they couldn't find a penny of El Chapo's 12 billion

https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/el-chapo-sentenced-forfeit-fortune-what-to-know

Bitcoin clearly has a causation effect on increasing fraud, kidnapping, extortion, ransomware.......how could it not........

Fraud - Credit Cards
Kidnapping - US Dollar
Extortion - Pick a value store
Ransomware - Crypto
Most other internet fraud - FIAT Wire Transfer or Giftcards

**** it, we could probably make a good argument for Pokemon Cards at this point:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57124256

[Deleted User]

FFVII wrote: »

Bottomless pit of tax payer money and the HSE couldn't keep their windows XP updated.

Not the cause. This same attack can happen with any OS.

[Deleted User]

FFVII wrote: »

Bottomless pit of tax payer money and the HSE couldn't keep their windows XP updated.

They sorted XP years ago.
https://www.pfh.ie/success/type/security/story/hse-western-europe-s-largest-microsoft-it-project-puts-hse-in-good-health/

The challenge in the health environment is often the control systems attached to very expensive medical equipment, large scanners, x-ray machines, intensive care equipment, drug delivery equipment - which has dedicated software, which may not run on current platforms, or may not be certified to run on current platforms.

FFVII wrote: »

Off the shelf ransomware that copies everything. If HSE don't pay then publish it all. What then? Time for top guy to go, job well done. 250,000 pension well earned.

Why exactly would the 'top guy' go? It is effectively impossible to prevent a zero day exploit getting into your systems. All you can do is ensure that you can recover reasonably well.

pioneerpro

AndrewJRenko wrote: »

Why exactly would the 'top guy' go? It is effectively impossible to prevent a zero day exploit getting into your systems. All you can do is ensure that you can recover reasonably well.

The issue here is not one of predicting and mitigating a novel exploit, but rather having appropriate high-availability failover and data redundancy plans suitable for a critical national body.

Almost every SaaS industry has a requirement for things like 'Five 9s' uptime and automatic failover of critical core systems. That the health-service doesn't is an absolutely scathing indictment of its treatment of Healthcare IT as a cost-center over the last 20 years, rather than as the core provisioning service that it represents.

In any case, this sort of non-targeted ransomware attack being anything other than a 'wipe and restore from last night's backup' is *always* the fault of:

* Poor control and granularity of user permissions
* Escalation of privilege above the use-case of the system
* Lack of monitoring in file-handles
* Lack of a network 'DMZ' to prevent the spread
* Lack of battle-tested fail-over and backup/restore procedures

In short, they done goofed.

[Deleted User]

pioneerpro wrote: »

The issue here is not one of predicting and mitigating a novel exploit, but rather having appropriate high-availability failover and data redundancy plans suitable for a critical national body.

Almost every SaaS industry has a requirement for things like 'Five 9s' uptime and automatic failover of critical core systems. That the health-service doesn't is an absolutely scathing indictment of its treatment of Healthcare IT as a cost-center over the last 20 years, rather than as the core provisioning service that it represents.

In any case, this sort of non-targeted ransomware attack being anything other than a 'wipe and restore from last night's backup' is *always* the fault of:

* Poor control and granularity of user permissions
* Escalation of privilege above the use-case of the system
* Lack of monitoring in file-handles
* Lack of a network 'DMZ' to prevent the spread
* Lack of battle-tested fail-over and backup/restore procedures

In short, they done goofed.

Congrats on your ability to diagnose the cause of a problem that the relevant teams are still stuck in the middle of.

pioneerpro

AndrewJRenko wrote: »

Congrats on your ability to diagnose the cause of a problem that the relevant teams are still stuck in the middle of.

The relevant teams are doing after-the-fact mitigation of the catastrophic impact of exploiting a known attack vector, not exclusively diagnosing what happened.

The reason they're doing this is because their existing processes weren't fit for purpose.

HGVRHKYY

Bitcoin is a fully public ledger, intelligence agencies are already able to contract companies who can specifically trace criminals through the blockchain, so it's actually pretty stupid that anyone would use Bitcoin for a ransom these days instead of Monero. Just look at the recent news that a Bitcoin mixer service and its owner was taken down, there is software for analysing the blockchain so well these days

It's actually probably better for them to use Bitcoin due to its inherent open and immutable nature which will give intelligence agencies some chance to continue tracking and tracing the transactions afterwards if the ransom is actually paid

Speaks volumes about you that you'd be mad about this and not the HSEs lack of preparation by ensuring they've got their IT security up to spec

[Deleted User]

pioneerpro wrote: »

The relevant teams are doing after-the-fact mitigation of the catastrophic impact of exploiting a known attack vector, not exclusively diagnosing what happened.

The reason they're doing this is because their existing processes weren't fit for purpose.

What was the known attack vector used?

MrMusician18

There has to be a recognition that crypto is the enabling tech for this kind of crime. Yes it was possible before, but crypto makes it much much harder to investigate. Consequently, we will see this wild west regulated. While the protocol itself is hard used to regulate, what you will see is the control of the money in and out of the system and the control of mining

You don't need to break the algorithm to break crypto. Just starve it.

pioneerpro

AndrewJRenko wrote: »

What was the known attack vector used?

Encryption of files with a private key. And I'm not being facetious here.

How it originally became resident in the system isn't really of relevance - see previous comments about 0 days. It's about the subsequent inability to mitigate its impact on a production system due to lack of quarantined failover/backup and established and practiced processes.

Take this simple flow model

The categorisation was done in respect to the stages of ransomware deployment methods with a predictive model we developed called Randep. The stages are fingerprint, propagate, communicate, map, encrypt, lock, delete and threaten.

https://crimesciencejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40163-019-0097-9

The map/encrypt/lock part of the flow is the bit where it should have been caught. File-handle monitoring and examination of memory-resident applications and their I/O processes should have triggered an alarm - at which point simply switching the relevant networkshares/file-systems to read-only would have completely stopped propogation of this worm in its tracks.

If you don't have the privileges and the ability to encrypt files on the file system, then the attack simply can't happen.

Fair enough, if it's not caught it's not caught. But what's the failover plan in this case? And was it sufficient? It seems not.

Indeed, the patient zero will most likely turn out to be a generic phishing eMail opened in a WFH scenario by someone with inappropriate system privileges, rather than a targeted spear-phishing or social engineering attack. I won't blame them - people are people and not everyone is tech-savvy to the point where they're immune to these. I blame the processes in place to protect them from themselves.

Cybersecurity is basically about mitigating the unknown through best-practice recovery practices - having the ability to quarantine and restore from a known good backup with little or no downtime, rather than having fingerprinting and eliminating a series of patched binaries in a live system.

That said, I wish the poor contractors pulling their 30th hour in a row of NFS logs all the best. It's a brutal situation to be in.