Of course it's very saintly of you to refuse to pay, but often not paying is a very bad business decision. You can be sure that enough people will pay for your refusal to not make any difference.
So saintly? No way.
I didn't refuse to pay because I thought it would be inspirational or set an example or bla bla bla. It was because I'm not a dumb mark, and I'm not going to let my clients be. And personally, I'd rather burn my house to the ground than let someone rob it.
That is your personal choice and you're more than welcome to go up in flames if that is what you wish. You should have no rights however to force your personal choice upon the others. They might have a different perspective.
I agree that with DDoS extortion the situation is way more complicated, and the attacker will eventually move on if you don't pay.
> And personally, I'd rather burn my house to the ground than let someone rob it.
I think we can all agree that this is just plain stupid. Cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Will fewer companies pay? Sure. Does it matter? No. Ransomware gangs wouldn't go anywhere even if their average payments got cut down by 90%, and the stuff they might switch to (BEC) isn't going to go away either.
You're joking. There are already many who don't pay, payment rates could fall by 90% and it wouldn't slow them down a bit. You clearly have no idea how hugely profitable ransomware is.
If less companies pay, the ransomware operations will just scale up their customer support teams and further automate deployment. This really isn't going to be a problem for them.
> Maybe formal proofs of all code? There are a lot of things that companies who aren't going to pay will start demanding of their vendors who they will pay.
Haha. Funny. Have you ever worked with formal proofs in a software context?
You misunderstand. Those who don't pay still have the problem. They will invest in solutions. Some (like good well tested backups) only affect them, but others like hardening software make it harder for ransomeware to get anyone in the first place.
> f less companies pay, the ransomware operations will just scale up their customer support teams and further automate deployment. This really isn't going to be a problem for them.
True. Though the less companies that pay, the more examples of not paying get out there and so the more likely it is other companies will get good protection for themselves.
Probably not enough to really affect profits too much, but still helpful to limit the amount of investment "big evil" can afford to do.
> Have you ever worked with formal proofs in a software context
Just a little bit. I'm looking to work with them more because for my area quality is important and we have reached the limits of what unit and manual testing can do. (but not the limits of other automatic code analysis which I'm also looking into)
Even those who pay are also investing in solutions, but the reality is that throwing money at this isn't going to make ransomware go away. Billions have been poured into this, and billions more will follow. What does that money get us? Mostly snake oil antivirus products, and big full page ads in the Economist for said snake oil products. I can't imagine that we're going to see significant results on a timeframe that you'd consider acceptable, maybe in 20 years.
>True. Though the less companies that pay, the more examples of not paying get out there and so the more likely it is other companies will get good protection for themselves.
>Probably not enough to really affect profits too much, but still helpful to limit the amount of investment "big evil" can afford to do.
Honestly, I think stories of companies paying out huge amounts has more of a chilling effect on ransomware than stories of companies refusing to pay. The huge ransom payment gives everyone a concrete number to be afraid of, a refusal to pay is a non-story unless it causes devastating damage to the company in question.
>Just a little bit. I'm looking to work with them more because for my area quality is important and we have reached the limits of what unit and manual testing can do. (but not the limits of other automatic code analysis which I'm also looking into)
The problem here is that you will never be able to produce a useful formally proven general purpose desktop software stack that would present meaningful advantages over current systems. Formal verification really only works for very simple pieces of software, and in any case, formal verification is only as good as the model you are verifying against.
We're not going to see formally verified web browsers, nor are we going to get a formally verified microsoft office suite.
second thought - here in the USA in the mid-2000s there were waves of identity theft and also mortgage fraud.. massive waves, very large numbers of accounts and even larger dollar amounts. I believe it was BANK-related employess and USA-based people who knew the credit system, performing quite a bit of all of that, with eyes open! the reputed phrase was "you wont be here, I wont be here" about the consequences down the road.
Sure, name-your-enemy Eastern Europeans are caught doing these things, outside of the reach of the casual US law.. but is it ONLY outsiders? or, you just dont know how badly your own money system employees are stealing from you now.
Try to find a not-russian site with as many people discussing this stuff. It really do be like that sometimes.
are you accustomed to talking like that? why do you have those screenshots?
It's a "meme". Unless you refer to the really badly google translated screenshot, in which case yes, but I've now learned sufficient Russian that it's easier for me to read without.
>why do you have those screenshots?
I follow a bunch of these forums for intelligence gathering purposes. There are companies paying ridiculous amounts for a few of these screenshots and a little accompanying text, it's apparently called "threat intelligence".
Do you have something to the contrary, or is this just a hunch?
It appears from a casual read of spy-versus-spy sort of documents, like tell-all books or dramatic movie scripts, that "false flag" is a standard play, since forever. Second, mysterious enemies that speak in unintelligible tongues, are the perfect cover for any institution failing its own constituents.
My experience in life is that money people are attracted to money jobs which then handle money with imperfect rules. Experience also says that business is often a dog-eat-dog world where company loyalty is repaid with termination or lower wages. When confronted with the dichotomy of "thats just business" alcohol and pain-killer abuse are common responses of an injured individual. Multiply that by thousands and mortgage pressure, kids college pressure, or just skid-row entrance behavior, and you get "corruption"
creative examples from the 2000s when aforementioned mortgage fraud ran like fire through the USA: a middle-aged immigrant meeting discreetly at a restaurant, discussing with a colleague a long-term siphoning and fraud scheme, gets back into their mid-range luxory car and goes to their suburban home in the USA; an alcholic single-mother forges a few signatures while on ordinary day duty with no one watching; an up-and-coming sales guy with a sports background wants to "level up" on their property purchase next year.
I do understand that non-US people, non-English speaking people, do run blatent scams. I myself have caught a PHP hook script on a server I ran, which pullled from some Bulgarian hacker board, an infection via a single ID number, like a menu. Of course that is true! but I object to fueling prejuidices by nationality, of people.. human beings.
Most humans are innocent of all of this activity. Yet, almost every single Western adult must have money in an account somewhere. The fundemental divisiveness of the Western monetary system, now under pressure from lockdowns, retirement and health problems, appears to me to be reaching East Germany levels, and I object to wholly and readily attributing this to "outsiders"
And this is something where the law can help. Paying a ransom in these kinds of situations needs to be a felony. The punishment needs to be dealt to everyone who acted or knew and didn't report, and it needs to be harsh enough that even in the worst cases people would rather call the cops and report than risk it. (Or, at least some employee in the organization would report it and save their own hide than risk it to protect their boss.)
The ramsomware crisis is really bad now, and it keeps getting worse. It will not stop getting worse until the money dries up. Small businesses cannot be expected to have the level of IT knowledge that they absolutely can't be hacked. The reason they weren't victimized before at this level was that the money wasn't there. There are enough places in the world where the authorities will look the other way (or actively cheer on the criminals), meaning this will not end until the flow of money is stopped.
If you want to mitigate the losses caused by ransomware gangs, create a subsidized insurance system that helps the victims. Just, that insurance is not allowed to pay off the criminals, just help the business get back on it's feet.
These groups aren't going to go away even if 95% of companies suddenly stopped paying, deploying ransomware costs next to nothing. There's also a huge incentive for ransomware actors to punish this sort of regulation.
> The ramsomware crisis is really bad now, and it keeps getting worse.
How come everybody is crying about the "ransomware crisis", but you never hear about a "BEC crisis"? BEC losses are bigger than ransomware losses, and they keep getting worse.