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Comment by hathawsh | Hacker News Reader

It's surprising that the attackers ask victims to send an email. Why not ask victims to publicly post a picture of their screen to social networks with a certain hash tag (and a new account)? That would be less traceable and harder to shut down, I think.

Not that I want to give attackers any ideas... :-)

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There's so many creative things you can do when you imagine yourself as one of these attackers.

- Make a big target amount of money that any large company can pay, eg $10M, and tell people you'll release everyone's key if the amount is raised.

- Use an online board like this one to control the state of your network.

- Embarrass individual firms by posting pics of their offices from their own webcams.

Etc, etc. I reckon talking about these sorts of things will help find solutions rather than just inspire the bad guys.

> Make a big target amount of money that any large company can pay, eg $10M

That sounds like a good way to get state level actors on your case.

Yes, as long as the payments are individually relatively small and anonymous, it's easy for people to misunderstand the amount they may actually be getting. Once you paint a target in the millions, people will notice more, it will become a bigger news story, some congressman or another will make it a pet cause, and then you've got a lot or attention on you. Like any criminal enterprise, the less attention from authorities the better.

Thanks, we'll give it a go next time.

I've seen variants that use Bitmessage and other anonymous messengers before.

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