> Dutch police reportedly used flash-bang grenades in an effort to stun and apprehend Van der Stap as he was logged in to various online accounts.
Holy moly, this is the first time I hear about this tactic. I remember more benign distraction tactics used previously with Ross Ulbricht and the other guy in Thailand running another darknet marketplace.
In one of Sean Carroll's AMA's, he once said something along the lines of "entropy favors the attacker over the defender."
That really stuck with me. My internal thought was "it's easier to kick over a sand castle than to build one." It seems to ring true for infosec, societal structures, and kinetic cases. Is this just a base truth?
Well, I don't want to get on the capital E - engineering tangent regarding software. But yeah, agreed on that. In most cases, we have been vibe engineering software this whole time.
Tangent aside, entropy favors the attacker even in the case of a building that has PE stamps on the plans and passes all codes at time of construction. Just leave it alone for a while with no maintenance, it will fall. Or, hire one man to correctly place charges. Far less work than what it took to build it.
edit: I want to make clear that what amazes me is how hard we fight entropy. We have built fragile societies, fragile technologies, we ourselves are fragile. And yet, humans are generally pretty cool and choose not to destroy all of these things, though we do have a few assholes amongst us.
"Software architecture" and engineering quality overall has had questionable quality at best. I don't see how vibe coding big new systems will make it better. I predict vibe coding will make for an even more golden age of hacking and a large increase in ransomware and breaking into systems. Today's giant hodgepodge of glued together software products could actually be better than vibing up something new.
I'd also expect the offensive side of hacking into systems will greatly benefit from LLMs finding an almost endless series of new vulnerabilities in even crappier llm software. I'm just so cynical.
That's kind of the definition of life tho, a system that fights, or "exports" entropy. Built in to our very code. Even the sand castle kickers are doing it for many years just just to be able get to the point to kick.
In the physical sense, entropy favors the attacker because destroying something is just helping it along the path it wants to take. Everything wants to turn into dust, all the time. It takes energy to prevent it from happening. The attacker can use significantly less energy to get it moving.
Consider the energy requirements to construct a skyscraper compared to the energy requirements to demolish one.
Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) which enforce mandatory governance and processes like resilience testing and cybersecurity lifecycle requirements.
GDPR & Data Protection frameworks which requires architecture to support CRUD operations on all PII, data minimization, customer-managed encryption architectures and so forth.
...and the anti-vibe code framework aka the EU AI Act, which requires human oversight and data quality controls.
This is completely aside from any industry specific engineering codes like in Finance where you have to adhere to things like ISO 20022 or iXBRL/ESEF standards, user accessibility mandates, and PCI Compliance mandates for things like Security Architecture over and above the CRA.
Yes, I've worded this as 'the asymmetry between creation and destruction'. Any idiot can destroy a piece of glass, it takes a whole raft of experts to make a pane and then some more to properly mount it.
Per the IRA after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Thatcher, "Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always."
It is not a base truth. It is just that complete negligence is currently standard, legal, and expected in most industries. Kind of like before basic sanitation was legally mandated at hospitals preventable deaths dramatically higher.
I have designed and audited systems for dozens of orgs that protect hundreds of billions in value and regular transaction volume. HSMs, remote attestation, quorum controlled servers with custom and fully audited operating systems, and in some cases a geodistributed network of underground bank vaults, NSA tempest spec zero emissions chambers, and security down to the laws of physics.
Security can be assured with high confidence for the right price, but very few are willing to pay for it and fewer still experienced enough to offer it. 15-200k a week is common depending on reputation, but I know at least one that claims to bill 1m/w.
Personally I do not believe hoarding effective security tactics for private audiences is ethical, and thus I insist any security work and research resulting from my work for employers, clients, and my own companies must all be freely licensed open source. No exceptions for any amount of money.
Security will be normalized when it as open, cheap, and too easy to justify not doing.
When you operate in an environment where every "good boy" can be wiped by a single "oh shit", statistics are against you. That is a base truth. The failure can rest on negligence but negligence isn't a necessary component for failure. For attackers their failures are wiped by a single success, for defenders their successes are wiped by a single failure.
In a different life I worked on designing and implementing similar systems to the ones you described, except with even more money going through them. They can can still be hacked, at incredible expense. And the hackers could even make a huge profit with the treasure trove they have access to. But getting away with it is orders of magnitude more difficult than the hack. The money involved to make the hack profitable is impossible to hide on the world stage. It takes a lot of political capital and military to be able to steal billions+++ and get away with it (nation state attackers, not just a group of hackers). So hackers go for lower risk jobs where the payout can even be similar just because of the lower cost to succeed.
> In one of Sean Carroll's AMA's, he once said something along the lines of "entropy favors the attacker over the defender."
Eh, kinda. The defenders have the advantage of playing on the home turf. They know their infrastructure, can have sensors and traps everywhere. The bad guys are stumbling in the dark. They have no idea what's real and what's a honeypot, what signals you're watching, etc.
The problem is that almost no one takes this advantage seriously. If you're not paying attention to your infra, yeah, you're gonna get owned.
Yeah but you know there trade offs like free society, freedom of movement, privacy and stuff that you need to sacrifice to take advantage of home turf. And you need to do this everywhere. Attacker can pick his targets on his own schedule, you need to defend always.
It just goes to show how pro-peace and stability humans are in general. It's so easy to cause death and destruction, and we most often do not choose to do that. While maybe peak_local_max_asshole = true, we have certainly been progressing in that direction, haven't we?
The vast majority of the competent people got DOGE’d. CISA lost like 40% of their staff including much of their red team specialty. 18F was completely eliminated (“Deleted” as Musk put it). If some specialist in the FBI who could have helped prevent the hack happened to have been assigned to work on the Classified Docs case, they were also fired because the most corrupt, incompetent group of morons is running things in DC for the next few years.
One of the most spectacular pieces of self-own for the current administration. Restructuring/deleting the directorate for biodefense during the previous administration (of the same color) would be up there.
...then the next predictable stage in the starve the beast cycle: "Why does CISA even need to exist? When was the last time you heard them do anything useful at all? Might as well shut them down and use a contractor in the private sector who knows how to get shit done and save taxpayer money on pensions."
($400 million no-bid contract goes to Oracle paying 5x as much per person, misses deadline for every key milestone, after one more $200 million extension claims government terms were impossible to meet and never delivers anything useful)
Not under this administration.. probably the closest is contributing to open source alternatives to services that were killed (like the IRS free tax filing that 18F helped to build and which was subsequently DOGE’d).
Government service pays far less than the private sector, particularly for software engineers. If you’re paying 2nd decile prices, you’re going to get 2nd decile performance.
What kind of incentive structure do most ransomware negotiation firms use that would actually cause them to benefit from coordination with the ransomware groups, as happened in this case? Do ransomware negotiators get paid more if they negotiate a lower price?
I believe the incentive is that they help establish a reputable connection between the ransomware group and the victim.
From what I have read in the past is that victims have no reason to trust ransomware groups and pay because what is stopping them from just demanding more money or hacking the company again. So from what I read is that ransomware companies depend on building a trust that after payment you will get your data back and he left alone.
So I believe that by working with a ransomware negotiator, a company that assumingly is a legitimate lawful business, the victim and hacker both benefit with the trust that this middleman is legit and the working history established has shown that those who pay do end up getting their data back.
TLDR: why believe a hacker that if you pay they will actually leave you alone. But a legitimate middleman with a history of dealing with these things and a proven track record can establish immediately confidence that paying will result in data recovery. So it's not about a lower price but rather a confidence you won't get screwed after paying.
Depending on where you are, it is arguably illegal (money laundering, dealing with proceeds of crime, maybe contravening sanctions depending on the gang) but I’m not aware of this being tested.
Did everyone in this comment section just miss the fact that the contents of the article are primarily Krebs’ research? The feds haven’t actually said anything publicly. Krebs cites someone close to the investigation, but that’s it.
Yeah it feels like this guy is probably innocent and refused to be an informant of some kind. He probably was approached to help entrap them, stayed out of it and now the FBI is ruining his life for it.
I wouldnt really trust them under any admin, but yeah this current regime is definately will to play fast and loose with people's lives to make themselves seem competent.
As much as this is a bit of a shit post I dont think it is wrong. Both sides behind the scenes are in pretty strong lockstep.
Thered need to be changes in how lobbying and certain countries are registered to make a dent. Everyone says age but I dont think that matters as much as the lobbying industry. Young people are every bit as corruptible as the old.
Working in the IR space I’ve had a lot of opportunities to work with negotiators before. Most of them are extremely professional and worth their weight in gold for what they provide to their clients.
Ridiculous that scumbags like this are tarnishing that space.
I do (half) remember reading that book! I actually meant to ask (in my question above) whether that book is actually "accurate"/representative of malware negotiations.
No honestly, most of the time it’s very formulaic. You can usually tell how it’s going to go once you know who has your data.
For instance, what’s mentioned in the article about not dealing with COM actors is great advice because chances are they’re going to keep your data and sell it or use it for future extortions no matter whether you pay.
Other actors though have a reputation to uphold to get paid and they know it.
An example of the process is something like:
1. Notification by ransom operators Including proof. Negotiations start at some arbitrary number like 6 percent of reported earnings.
2. Negotiators notified.
3. Back and forth begins. “This isn’t really that much data, do you have more? It’s not that damning. Fine, my client is willing to pay 50k. 60k? Okay, but you need to provide proof of how you got I the data so we can close the gap”.
Ransom negotiators are all scumbags. Their actions perpetuate further criminality and place others at greater risk. Paying a ransom should always be a criminal offense, even if not paying means that people die and businesses are destroyed.
Huh? You'd rather criminals make a little less money than hospitals getting taken offline and people dying? Or power utilities. Very cringe to care more about how much pieces of paper a criminal has than your community member's lives. I definately do not want you as my neighbor.
Reading their comment strongly, as the guidelines suggest, it seems they want criminals to make $0 so they stop doing that. Is it not equally "cringe" to say society can't put up with some discomfort so assholes don't get free vacations and nice toys. It's a disguised trolley problem, and there's no agreed upon answer for that one either.
We all gotta do what we can to get through the day, but you can't live next to someone who has the same challenge but a different answer to some trolly problem? Is your future world just a bunch of closed communities where outsiders and ideas and their differ skin color and economic background aren't welcome?
> it seems they want criminals to make $0 so they stop doing that
And yet arguably the criminals are unwittingly performing a useful public service we might describe as involuntary pentesting with a financial penalty on failure. The ethical way to get rid of the criminals in this scenario is to institute competent regulation (ie not mindless box ticking) and enforcement.
Hypothetically we are all arguably better off with a ransomware attack if the alternative is a cyberattack by a geopolitical adversary at a later date.
How is that a useful service? This is only useful because the criminals exist and are doing it. Are killers providing a useful service because people then use protection so they don't get killed?
Or perhaps it is useful by hardening systems in case you enter a war with another country, but presumably the other country has the same problems so it's a zero sum game.
Yeah but you're proposing a trolley problem where we kill the five people on the other track so the single guy on the track can't have nice clothes lol.
Or we pay the criminals, not let innocent people die because turbo nerds care about rewarding cyber criminals who will exist no matter what.
So I guess we should just let people die though, atleast the feds will have jobs and be able to go on vacation and not those damn criminals!! Although I fail to see much difference between US law enforcement and cyber criminals, both of their existence relies on the threat of violance and the extortion of the public with that violence.
Also I'm pretty sure the FBI gave birth to the shiny hunters if you look into it for more than 10 minutes. Its a bunch of kids they basically have chosen not to punish at various points in their criminal evolution. Its almost like they need these phenomenons to exist.
My ideal society is one without crooked cops, but alas I dont think that's likely either so in the meantime, until we can find a solution to that problem we probably shouldnt punish the innocent patients of hospitals.
It seems to me that money and the status of criminals is more important to you than human life, so we should probably deal with whatever brain worm has infected you too.
It's a stupid what-if scenario and there are endless variations. What if the ransomware attack doesn't kill anybody? What if the ransomware attack ends up saving a patient because the surgeon is given more time to think about a case so they don't make the mistake they would have? What if that hospital being shut down means a patient was sent to a different ER where the attending on duty was able to save the victim because of something unique to them from their past.
What if the cybercriminals doesn't use the money to buy nicer clothes but instead uses it to go on vacation but gets themselves killed? Are we supposed to be sad someone who inflicted pain on others died? Is all life sacred or not? Or is some more sacred than others? What if they use it to fund terrorists that end up killing lots of people, possibly even someone you know? Was it still worth it then? What if the criminals use to bomb churches and subways? What if one of the cyber criminals uses it to buy people? or kill homeless people for fun?
Another direction we can go is, I forget where this is from off the top of my head, but a human life is calculated to be worth about $10 million. So then if we're going to do another different point of view and put this into economics, we should figure out how many people shutting down the hospital will kill and see how much the group is charging and compare the two, right?
Talk is cheap and it's easy to spend other people's money or dismiss it as bits of paper. How much of your money are willing to give the criminals for the hospital to stay open? How many nights are you willing to go hungry and stay in so that the criminals can walk free? Because if it's arbitrary money that's not yours, of course it's easy to give away. It's based on a facile understanding of the world though.
If nothing is more important than saving human lives, what are you doing on HN, not curing cancer right now? People are dying!
Not touching on the rest of this back and forth but your probably wrong about parasites not affecting beliefs and critical thinking
For instance toxoplasmosis
No offense, Im just going to end this conversation because you dont really seem capable of thinking deeply about a topic like this. I really wish I didnt have to share a world with people like you that think the value of a human life can be reduced to numbers on a calculator.
Yes, I would absolutely rather have that. Preventing criminals from receiving additional money prevents them from having the resources to attack others in the future. Unlike you, I actually care about my community and think deeply about the consequences.
Alternately they may not believe starving out the criminals will actually work and so foresee different consequences. Like when Google penalized SEO, and so spammers used their networks for extortion instead of spam. Similarly if we killed ransomware, the machinery built to conduct these attacks would not just lie fallow. It's capital that will continue to be leveraged to generate returns. We may not like the next business model they come up with.
It's not a contest, we all can care and think deeply and still come to different conclusions.
This is a very narrow framing, and that is what I am trying to get at. Obviously it would be absurd to deliberately provide welfare to criminal enterprises. But our adversaries get a vote in what happens. There is a level of risk at which you are forced to pay the ransom.
If we don't get trapped in this false binary we might consider other options. I think the takeaway from my comment should be, if you want to make it illegal to pay a ransom to these groups, then you will also need to dismantle their infrastructure and organization. Otherwise you're just putting the ball in their court and hoping they'll fumble it. It's not that we're "scared," it's that that isn't a strategy.
Even if it was a loved one of yours who was in danger? You would rather your children, parents, or spouse die, instead of paying the kidnappers a ransom?
It sounds like you don’t understand the problem very well. Forgive me if that’s an incorrect interpretation.
One way to prevent this type of crime is to ensure that it is never profitable. The downside is that there will be losses until the message is thoroughly communicated.
Who cares if criminals have nice things, Id rather innocent people dont die. Most criminals tend to find ways to ruin their own lives at some point anyways. Peoples lives > pieces of paper.
Its like you're proposing a trolly problem where you choose the 5 people on a track to die because you don't want the single guy on a track to have nice clothes.
"Criminals having vacations and nice things" wasn't a great framing, "criminal enterprises continue to have revenue to reinvest in more crimes" is the better one.
Even before the current administration, federal law enforcement's leaks of suspects, especially in high-profile crimes, have been highly unreliable and have ruined lives. See Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell, etc.
Holy moly, this is the first time I hear about this tactic. I remember more benign distraction tactics used previously with Ross Ulbricht and the other guy in Thailand running another darknet marketplace.
The OPM breach was 11 years ago and apparently the incompetence still reigns.
That really stuck with me. My internal thought was "it's easier to kick over a sand castle than to build one." It seems to ring true for infosec, societal structures, and kinetic cases. Is this just a base truth?
Try kicking over a building sometime. (Or don't - you'll stub your toe).
Tangent aside, entropy favors the attacker even in the case of a building that has PE stamps on the plans and passes all codes at time of construction. Just leave it alone for a while with no maintenance, it will fall. Or, hire one man to correctly place charges. Far less work than what it took to build it.
edit: I want to make clear that what amazes me is how hard we fight entropy. We have built fragile societies, fragile technologies, we ourselves are fragile. And yet, humans are generally pretty cool and choose not to destroy all of these things, though we do have a few assholes amongst us.
I'd also expect the offensive side of hacking into systems will greatly benefit from LLMs finding an almost endless series of new vulnerabilities in even crappier llm software. I'm just so cynical.
Consider the energy requirements to construct a skyscraper compared to the energy requirements to demolish one.
required codes and standards may raise one (difficulty of removal) or both (difficulty of removal + difficulty of construction) in varying proportion.
Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) and Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) which enforce mandatory governance and processes like resilience testing and cybersecurity lifecycle requirements.
GDPR & Data Protection frameworks which requires architecture to support CRUD operations on all PII, data minimization, customer-managed encryption architectures and so forth.
...and the anti-vibe code framework aka the EU AI Act, which requires human oversight and data quality controls.
This is completely aside from any industry specific engineering codes like in Finance where you have to adhere to things like ISO 20022 or iXBRL/ESEF standards, user accessibility mandates, and PCI Compliance mandates for things like Security Architecture over and above the CRA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Mountbatten
I see The Troubles, as a civil war in UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_troubles
So you're starting this all over again eh?
I have designed and audited systems for dozens of orgs that protect hundreds of billions in value and regular transaction volume. HSMs, remote attestation, quorum controlled servers with custom and fully audited operating systems, and in some cases a geodistributed network of underground bank vaults, NSA tempest spec zero emissions chambers, and security down to the laws of physics.
Security can be assured with high confidence for the right price, but very few are willing to pay for it and fewer still experienced enough to offer it. 15-200k a week is common depending on reputation, but I know at least one that claims to bill 1m/w.
Personally I do not believe hoarding effective security tactics for private audiences is ethical, and thus I insist any security work and research resulting from my work for employers, clients, and my own companies must all be freely licensed open source. No exceptions for any amount of money.
Security will be normalized when it as open, cheap, and too easy to justify not doing.
Shameless plug, this is why I co-founded Caution.
When you operate in an environment where every "good boy" can be wiped by a single "oh shit", statistics are against you. That is a base truth. The failure can rest on negligence but negligence isn't a necessary component for failure. For attackers their failures are wiped by a single success, for defenders their successes are wiped by a single failure.
In a different life I worked on designing and implementing similar systems to the ones you described, except with even more money going through them. They can can still be hacked, at incredible expense. And the hackers could even make a huge profit with the treasure trove they have access to. But getting away with it is orders of magnitude more difficult than the hack. The money involved to make the hack profitable is impossible to hide on the world stage. It takes a lot of political capital and military to be able to steal billions+++ and get away with it (nation state attackers, not just a group of hackers). So hackers go for lower risk jobs where the payout can even be similar just because of the lower cost to succeed.
The whole “you don’t have to outswim the shark, just the guy next to you.”
It's much harder to have perfect opsec and never be caught for the wrongdoing. The other side only needs patience.
Eh, kinda. The defenders have the advantage of playing on the home turf. They know their infrastructure, can have sensors and traps everywhere. The bad guys are stumbling in the dark. They have no idea what's real and what's a honeypot, what signals you're watching, etc.
The problem is that almost no one takes this advantage seriously. If you're not paying attention to your infra, yeah, you're gonna get owned.
They can have, but they’re sufficiently tied up with other corporate busy work that they don’t.
($400 million no-bid contract goes to Oracle paying 5x as much per person, misses deadline for every key milestone, after one more $200 million extension claims government terms were impossible to meet and never delivers anything useful)
Do you think Donnie loses a microsecond of sleep over this?
18F -> https://ndstudio.gov
As seen credited on recent publications like real realfood.gov.
(Ill note that this design studio is being led by newly proud white nationalist Joe gebbia who apparently blames illegal aliens and their ‘anchor babies’ for high housing costs apparently while unironically forgetting he cofounded airbnb: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VCGY!,w_1272,c_limit... - I mean look at these posts back to back, I wonder why they’re unable to recruit anyone: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ArmA!,w_1272,c_limit...)
Although I personally wouldn't lift a finger for the corrupt Christ clowns that run America these days.
https://m.xkcd.com/932/
From what I have read in the past is that victims have no reason to trust ransomware groups and pay because what is stopping them from just demanding more money or hacking the company again. So from what I read is that ransomware companies depend on building a trust that after payment you will get your data back and he left alone.
So I believe that by working with a ransomware negotiator, a company that assumingly is a legitimate lawful business, the victim and hacker both benefit with the trust that this middleman is legit and the working history established has shown that those who pay do end up getting their data back.
TLDR: why believe a hacker that if you pay they will actually leave you alone. But a legitimate middleman with a history of dealing with these things and a proven track record can establish immediately confidence that paying will result in data recovery. So it's not about a lower price but rather a confidence you won't get screwed after paying.
[0]: FBI arrests Canadian cybersecurity expert in ShinyHunters hacking case (6 points, 8 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50066759
I wouldnt really trust them under any admin, but yeah this current regime is definately will to play fast and loose with people's lives to make themselves seem competent.
Thered need to be changes in how lobbying and certain countries are registered to make a dent. Everyone says age but I dont think that matters as much as the lobbying industry. Young people are every bit as corruptible as the old.
Ridiculous that scumbags like this are tarnishing that space.
Thanks!
For instance, what’s mentioned in the article about not dealing with COM actors is great advice because chances are they’re going to keep your data and sell it or use it for future extortions no matter whether you pay.
Other actors though have a reputation to uphold to get paid and they know it.
An example of the process is something like:
1. Notification by ransom operators Including proof. Negotiations start at some arbitrary number like 6 percent of reported earnings.
2. Negotiators notified.
3. Back and forth begins. “This isn’t really that much data, do you have more? It’s not that damning. Fine, my client is willing to pay 50k. 60k? Okay, but you need to provide proof of how you got I the data so we can close the gap”.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ransomware-re...
https://complexdiscovery.com/a-48-month-federal-benchmark-re...
https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
We all gotta do what we can to get through the day, but you can't live next to someone who has the same challenge but a different answer to some trolly problem? Is your future world just a bunch of closed communities where outsiders and ideas and their differ skin color and economic background aren't welcome?
And yet arguably the criminals are unwittingly performing a useful public service we might describe as involuntary pentesting with a financial penalty on failure. The ethical way to get rid of the criminals in this scenario is to institute competent regulation (ie not mindless box ticking) and enforcement.
Hypothetically we are all arguably better off with a ransomware attack if the alternative is a cyberattack by a geopolitical adversary at a later date.
Or perhaps it is useful by hardening systems in case you enter a war with another country, but presumably the other country has the same problems so it's a zero sum game.
"By any means" is a current movie with the FBI case.
Or we pay the criminals, not let innocent people die because turbo nerds care about rewarding cyber criminals who will exist no matter what.
So I guess we should just let people die though, atleast the feds will have jobs and be able to go on vacation and not those damn criminals!! Although I fail to see much difference between US law enforcement and cyber criminals, both of their existence relies on the threat of violance and the extortion of the public with that violence.
Also I'm pretty sure the FBI gave birth to the shiny hunters if you look into it for more than 10 minutes. Its a bunch of kids they basically have chosen not to punish at various points in their criminal evolution. Its almost like they need these phenomenons to exist.
My ideal society is one without crooked cops, but alas I dont think that's likely either so in the meantime, until we can find a solution to that problem we probably shouldnt punish the innocent patients of hospitals.
It seems to me that money and the status of criminals is more important to you than human life, so we should probably deal with whatever brain worm has infected you too.
> When disagreeing, reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Linked at the bottom of the page.
It's a stupid what-if scenario and there are endless variations. What if the ransomware attack doesn't kill anybody? What if the ransomware attack ends up saving a patient because the surgeon is given more time to think about a case so they don't make the mistake they would have? What if that hospital being shut down means a patient was sent to a different ER where the attending on duty was able to save the victim because of something unique to them from their past.
What if the cybercriminals doesn't use the money to buy nicer clothes but instead uses it to go on vacation but gets themselves killed? Are we supposed to be sad someone who inflicted pain on others died? Is all life sacred or not? Or is some more sacred than others? What if they use it to fund terrorists that end up killing lots of people, possibly even someone you know? Was it still worth it then? What if the criminals use to bomb churches and subways? What if one of the cyber criminals uses it to buy people? or kill homeless people for fun?
Another direction we can go is, I forget where this is from off the top of my head, but a human life is calculated to be worth about $10 million. So then if we're going to do another different point of view and put this into economics, we should figure out how many people shutting down the hospital will kill and see how much the group is charging and compare the two, right?
Talk is cheap and it's easy to spend other people's money or dismiss it as bits of paper. How much of your money are willing to give the criminals for the hospital to stay open? How many nights are you willing to go hungry and stay in so that the criminals can walk free? Because if it's arbitrary money that's not yours, of course it's easy to give away. It's based on a facile understanding of the world though.
If nothing is more important than saving human lives, what are you doing on HN, not curing cancer right now? People are dying!
https://asm.org/articles/2026/may/toxoplasma-made-me-do-it-h...
It's not a contest, we all can care and think deeply and still come to different conclusions.
Deliberately letting ransomware go on, because you are scared that evil people may do something worse is quite absurd.
Deliberate welfare for criminals is in fact bad.
If we don't get trapped in this false binary we might consider other options. I think the takeaway from my comment should be, if you want to make it illegal to pay a ransom to these groups, then you will also need to dismantle their infrastructure and organization. Otherwise you're just putting the ball in their court and hoping they'll fumble it. It's not that we're "scared," it's that that isn't a strategy.
One way to prevent this type of crime is to ensure that it is never profitable. The downside is that there will be losses until the message is thoroughly communicated.
Who cares if criminals have nice things, Id rather innocent people dont die. Most criminals tend to find ways to ruin their own lives at some point anyways. Peoples lives > pieces of paper.
Its like you're proposing a trolly problem where you choose the 5 people on a track to die because you don't want the single guy on a track to have nice clothes.
that is one of reasons why ransomware should be being eliminated