The Future of Ransomware | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Ransomware

schneier.com

33 pointsSami_Lehtinen13 comments

Whatever you do, don't do business with MMO playing scottish-canadian accountants. Otherwise you're off for some fun adventures in China with some cantankerous russian mobsters who just lost access to their pensions to some 18 year old goldminer!

This is why I don't want smart appliances, and definitely not ones with computers essential to their function.

Most IoT applications are anti-features.

Oh well, maybe my future job can be retrofitting analog/basic digital controls to appliances and reselling them as "robust, secure" appliances.

https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2017/02/28/the-futu... there's also this post by Matthew Green (which has been submitted before to HN but hasn't gotten comments)

Pretty soon we're all going to wish our appliances were just appliances again...

<<rant>> I am looking to buy a New TV now... Attempting to find a non-smart TV is very hard, not impossible but there are very few options...

I bought my last TV in 2004, I want my next TV to last atleast 1/2 the time my Current TV has. There is no way the Embedded PC will continue to support all the new Applications and services in 6-10 years, I would be shocked if most of the smart TV functionality is dead in less than 2 years after purchase or if it does get updated it will run so poorly it will be nearly non-functional

I just want a Display I plug things into, I have FireTV's Roku's and rPI's to provide the smarts...

<<end rant>>

Just don't connect it to the internet and it's the same as a non-smart TV.

Why not an HDMI monitor with speakers? Nice and dumb...

I suppose the market will decide what gets sold.

Bricking the I(di)OT(ic) Components of smart devices as a service.

Lets just stop calling it ransomware- and lets just call it Outsourced Planned Obsolence.

I think it'd go a long way to make laws that require software that is embedded on devices to 1. be patchable by the user and 2. The software has to be open source if the company is no longer able to maintain it.

As a temporary workaround, consider connecting your IoT devices to a WiFi router that isn't connected to the Internet.

No, put them on a VLAN that doesn't have internet access.

That requires a lot more knowledge than most folks have. On the other hand, give them a separate router, and they can probably do that.

But they probably won't do it in either case.

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