I really don't understand what they are talking about. It's as if someone showed me a photo of my child and said, "pay me or I'll burn this photograph".
What am I missing?
You could never trust that the attacker actually deleted their copy of the repo, but then, the whole cryptolocking business model falls down if the attacker isn't at least moderately honest, so I can see why people would respond to that threat.
Nitpick: it only requires most attackers to be somewhat honest. Having a few unscrupulous ones may make life harder for the “honest” ones, but they themselves can be better of, e.g. by, after receiving payment, demanding more money.
In the same way that it's worse to shoot someone with an actual gun than to threaten to shoot them with a Nerf gun.
The negative network effects on other scammers are also nice.
An "honest cryptolocker" helps support more cryptolocker use, as people trust that if they pay the criminal they'll get their stuff
If dishonest ones were the norm, than maybe cryptolocking would cannibalize itself as nobody would pay since they know its useless. So in a sense the dishonest one while having less ethical intention has more ethical results. But only at scale. Hmmm.
society works with mutual cooperation and hackers seem to understand that more than the "technically cooperating in this context" that the legal field would employ
(This is probably not true, but society would benefit from "cryptolockers are usually fake" being in the zeitgeist)
This is a classic prisoners' dilemma: if no one payed, every one would be better off, but it is very hard to be that one guy or company who loses all his files for the "greater good".
That seems unwise. I don't have many local repos on this 128GB MacBookAir, but as well as BitBucket all the projects I have ever worked on are on other several machines and/or hard drives I have locally, and also zipped up in S3 buckets and on tarsnap.
Like they say, there's two kinds of people. People who've lost important data because they didn't back it up properly, and people who haven't yet.
Part of your backup strategy depends on external services. Not necessarily in your case, but people who only have their backups externally on a service could be affected.
> all the projects I have ever worked on are on other several machines and/or hard drives
And depending on your strategy, since they're so distributed it could mean they're outdated repos. If not, and they pull automatically, they could be affected.
Local backups also have issues. The disk might die, the data might be corrupted or any other myriad of things could happen.
> People who've lost important data because they didn't back it up properly, and people who haven't yet.
Is there such a thing as a perfect backup strategy?
At work, there's "Can meet contractually agreed RPO and RTO with 99.99% certainty". Automate the standard setup, and sleep well at night. Perfect.
At home, there's "I've done enough that I think the next improvement is an unfeasibly large amount of extra time&money for an unreasonably small improvement".
I've, for myself at home, settled on Apple's Time Machine backing up my Macs (and their phone/ipad iTunes backups) to a raid 10 set, that raid 10 set rsynced to another one at the opposite end of the house, and a weekly backup of that stored on a single drive that only powers up for 6 hours every Sunday night then powers back down again - so if my whole network gets breached and cryptolockered (for example) I'll still have at most 7 day old data at home. I also push that weekly backup out to S3 and tarsnap for off-site in-case-my-house-burns-down, or I've set it all on fire and moved to Belize scenarios...
I've been running most of that for ~8 years now. I've called it "done", while not "perfect", its certainly good enough against "not-Mossad threat models". If Mossad or The NSA want to delete my backups, so be it - I'll go be a carpenter or a gardener or something.