Hacker News Reader

Comment by jessaustin | Hacker News Reader

If the attacker isn't paid for the first attack, why would she attack again? She's not doing it for the lulz!

I do agree with you that there should be more visibility for the "silent majority" of firms who operate their businesses responsibly, and therefore don't ever need to pay ransom.

View on HN

Because second attacker might not be briefed by the first one.

If they actually have proper backups to avoid paying the first one, my guess is they are much more likely to also have the skills to prevent a second breach.

I agree on backups and actually working and robust restore system.

Cheapest way to avoid paying ransoms.

You can never be sure about 100% hacker safe but backup/restore system can be life saver

And also due to the attacks being cheap to run

That's not for us to intellectually deduce, give the numbers. They have it. Is it 79%? 99? 1?

Maybe it's all automated shotgun based attacks and they don't close the holes and so the act of paying the ransom is statistically meaningless

This is shoddy journalism. Might as well just say "X%". It implies you shouldn't pay lest you fall victim again but they don't actually say that.

Things that implicate what they refuse to say is kind of suspect

The "journalism" has been shoddy from the start. This entire "Russians are pwning the electric company" meme has always been motivated more by politics, CYA, PR, and marketing than it has by anything real. TFA itself is a mail-it-in, paraphrase-the-press-release "effort". They actually link to the press release rather than the original marketing document; it's possible TFA's authors haven't read the latter! There's no guarantee the marketing document answers your question, but if you have an email address you don't mind getting spammed you could find out for yourself. [0] I don't have such an email address.

[0] https://www.cybereason.com/ebook-ransomware-the-true-cost-to...

The whole point of gathering statistics is that making up logic for what could be the case is generally a massive waste of time.

If the victim doesn't pay the first time, they suffer consequences and next time might decide to pay instead.

ISTM we only hear about the tiny minority of "victims" who do "suffer consequences". Most organizations who get ransomed just shut off a bunch of unnecessary stuff, re-provision the necessary stuff with passwords turned off, restore from backup, and hire some security consultants.

The attacks are likely automated. Like any computer virus.

I'm sorry but I have to ask: why assume the attacker is female?

It seems like "they're" would've been a better choice there, as there are a plurality of attackers in the world.

Why not? Why assume that they are male?

Statistically it seems the safer bet that they are male.

Probably trying to diversify pronoun usage. Would we be pointing this out if they said 'he'?

No, because for better or worse “he” is the default for a plurality or unknown gender in most (all?) romance languages, including English. Times and sensitivities change but “she” still connotes more knowledge than “he” so it’s bound to cause some confusion.

what was true centuries ago is no longer true. "he" is not gender neutral in English, in any sense of the term. it's only used as such in historical writing - languages evolve over time. "she" connotes as much knowledge as "he".

Language changes over time, yes, but also over space. Something other than 'he' might be default where you are, but not where I am.

"Mallory" is commonly understood to be a woman's name. Come to think of it, so is "Trudy".

It's interesting to see the various reactions to a perfectly innocent idiom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_and_Bob#Cast_of_characte...

The first time I saw this (using female pronouns for an unidentified person instead of "him/her" or "they") was in RMS's writings. So instead of using the indefinite/singular they, RMS would just say she/her. I thought it was an interesting way to hack language to break assumptions we have about gender, especially in technology.

To preempt criticism.

I understand how this sort of off-topic snag can feel provocative, but please don't copy it into the thread where it can turn into an entire flamewar. There's nothing new in any of this at this point, and therefore nothing interesting. When there's nothing interesting, discussions turn nasty. Solution: focus on the interesting specific information and diffs in a post, and ignore the provocative bits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com