In one of Sean Carroll's AMA's, he once said something along the lines of "entropy favors the attacker over the defender."
That really stuck with me. My internal thought was "it's easier to kick over a sand castle than to build one." It seems to ring true for infosec, societal structures, and kinetic cases. Is this just a base truth?
Well, I don't want to get on the capital E engineering tangent regarding software. But yeah, 100% agreed on that. We have been vibe "engineering" software this entire time.
However, entropy favors the attacker even in the case of a building that has PE stamps on the plans, and passes all codes at time of construction. Just leave it alone for a while with no maintenance, it will fall.
Yes, I've worded this as 'the asymmetry between creation and destruction'. Any idiot can destroy a piece of glass, it takes a whole raft of experts to make a pane and then some more to properly mount it.
Per the IRA after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Thatcher, "Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always."
> In one of Sean Carroll's AMA's, he once said something along the lines of "entropy favors the attacker over the defender."
Eh, kinda. The defenders have the advantage of playing on the home turf. They know their infrastructure, can have sensors and traps everywhere. The bad guys are stumbling in the dark. They have no idea what's real and what's a honeypot, what signals you're watching, etc.
The problem is that almost no one takes this advantage seriously. If you're not paying attention to your infra, yeah, you're gonna get owned.
The vast majority of the competent people got DOGE’d. CISA lost like 40% of their staff including much of their red team specialty. 18F was completely eliminated (“Deleted” as Musk put it). If some specialist in the FBI who could have helped prevent the hack happened to have been assigned to work on the Classified Docs case, they were also fired because the most corrupt, incompetent group of morons is running things in DC for the next few years.
One of the most spectacular pieces of self-own for the current administration. Restructuring/deleting the directorate for biodefense during the previous administration (of the same color) would be up there.
Not under this administration.. probably the closest is contributing to open source alternatives to services that were killed (like the IRS free tax filing that 18F helped to build and which was subsequently DOGE’d).
Even before the current administration, federal law enforcement's leaks of suspects, especially in high-profile crimes, have been highly unreliable and have ruined lives. See Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell, etc.
Working in the IR space I’ve had a lot of opportunities to work with negotiators before. Most of them are extremely professional and worth their weight in gold for what they provide to their clients.
Ridiculous that scumbags like this are tarnishing that space.
I do (half) remember reading that book! I actually meant to ask (in my question above) whether that book is actually "accurate"/representative of malware negotiations.
No honestly, most of the time it’s very formulaic. You can usually tell how it’s going to go once you know who has your data.
For instance, what’s mentioned in the article about not dealing with COM actors is great advice because chances are they’re going to keep your data and sell it or use it for future extortions no matter whether you pay.
Other actors though have a reputation to uphold to get paid and they know it.
An example of the process is something like:
1. Notification by ransom operators Including proof. Negotiations start at some arbitrary number like 6 percent of reported earnings.
2. Negotiators notified.
3. Back and forth begins. “This isn’t really that much data, do you have more? It’s not that damning. Fine, my client is willing to pay 50k. 60k? Okay, but you need to provide proof of how you got I the data so we can close the gap”.
Ransom negotiators are all scumbags. Their actions perpetuate further criminality and place others at greater risk. Paying a ransom should always be a criminal offense, even if not paying means that people die and businesses are destroyed.
Huh? You'd rather criminals make a little less money than hospitals getting taken offline and people dying? Or power utilities. Very cringe to care more about how much pieces of paper a criminal has than your community member's lives. I definately do not want you as my neighbor.
Reading their comment strongly, as the guidelines suggest, it seems they want criminals to make $0 so they stop doing that. Is it not equally "cringe" to say society can't put up with some discomfort so assholes don't get free vacations and nice toys. It's a disguised trolley problem, and there's no agreed upon answer for that one either.
We all gotta do what we can to get through the day, but you can't live next to someone who has the same challenge but a different answer to some trolly problem? Is your future world just a bunch of closed communities where outsiders and ideas and their differ skin color and economic background aren't welcome?
Yeah but you're proposing a trolley problem where we kill the five people on the other track so the single guy on the track can't have nice clothes lol.
Or we pay the criminals, not let innocent people die because turbo nerds care about rewarding cyber criminals who will exist no matter what.
So I guess we should just let people die though, atleast the feds will have jobs and be able to go on vacation and not those damn criminals!! Although I fail to see much difference between US law enforcement and cyber criminals, both of their existence relies on the threat of violance and the extortion of the public with that violence.
Also I'm pretty sure the FBI gave birth to the shiny hunters if you look into it for more than 10 minutes. Its a bunch of kids they basically have chosen not to punish at various points in their criminal evolution. Its almost like they need these phenomenons to exist.
My ideal society is one without crooked cops, but alas I dont think that's likely either so in the meantime, until we can find a solution to that problem we probably shouldnt punish the innocent patients of hospitals.
It seems to me that money and the status of criminals is more important to you than human life, so we should probably deal with whatever brain worm has infected you too.
It's a stupid what-if scenario. What if the ransomware attack doesn't kill anybody? What if the ransomware attack ends up saving a patient because the surgeon is given more time to think about a case so they don't make the mistake they would have? What if that hospital being shut down means a patient was sent to a different ER where the attending on duty was able to save the victim because of something unique to them from their past. What if one of the cyber criminals slips and falls on vacation with their stolen money? Are we supposed to be sad someone who inflicted pain on others died? Is all life sacred or not? Or is some more sacred than others?
I forget who off the top of my head where this is from, but a human life is worth about $10 million. So then if we're going to put this into economics, we should figure out how many people shutting down the hospital will kill and see how much the group is charging and compare the two, right?
How much of your money are willing to give the criminals for the hospital to stay open? How many nights are you willing to go hungry and stay in so that the criminals can walk free? Because if it's arbitrary money that's not yours, of course it's easy to give away. It's based on a facile understanding of the world though.
If nothing is more important than saving human lives, what are you doing on HN, not curing cancer right now? People are dying!
Yes, I would absolutely rather have that. Preventing criminals from receiving additional money prevents them from having the resources to attack others in the future. Unlike you, I actually care about my community and think deeply about the consequences.
Alternately they may not believe starving out the criminals will actually work and so foresee different consequences. Like when Google penalized SEO, and so spammers used their networks for extortion instead of spam. Similarly if we killed ransomware, the machinery built to conduct these attacks would not just lie fallow. It's capital that will continue to be leveraged to generate returns. We may not like the next business model they come up with.
It's not a contest, we all can care and think deeply and still come to different conclusions.
It sounds like you don’t understand the problem very well. Forgive me if that’s an incorrect interpretation.
One way to prevent this type of crime is to ensure that it is never profitable. The downside is that there will be losses until the message is thoroughly communicated.
Who cares if criminals have nice things, Id rather innocent people dont die. Most criminals tend to find ways to ruin their own lives at some point anyways. Peoples lives > pieces of paper.
Its like you're proposing a trolly problem where you choose the 5 people on a track to die because you don't want the single guy on a track to have nice clothes.
"Criminals having vacations and nice things" wasn't a great framing, "criminal enterprises continue to have revenue to reinvest in more crimes" is the better one.
Did everyone in this comment section just miss the fact that the contents of the article are primarily Krebs’ research? The feds haven’t actually said anything publicly. Krebs cites someone close to the investigation, but that’s it.
Yeah it feels like this guy is probably innocent and refused to be an informant of some kind. He probably was approached to help entrap them, stayed out of it and now the FBI is ruining his life for it.
I wouldnt really trust them under any admin, but yeah this current regime is definately will to play fast and loose with people's lives to make themselves seem competent.
As much as this is a bit of a shit post I dont think it is wrong. Both sides behind the scenes are in pretty strong lockstep.
Thered need to be changes in how lobbying and certain countries are registered to make a dent. Everyone says age but I dont think that matters as much as the lobbying industry. Young people are every bit as corruptible as the old.
The OPM breach was 11 years ago and apparently the incompetence still reigns.
That really stuck with me. My internal thought was "it's easier to kick over a sand castle than to build one." It seems to ring true for infosec, societal structures, and kinetic cases. Is this just a base truth?
Try kicking over a building sometime. (Or don't - you'll stub your toe).
However, entropy favors the attacker even in the case of a building that has PE stamps on the plans, and passes all codes at time of construction. Just leave it alone for a while with no maintenance, it will fall.
Eh, kinda. The defenders have the advantage of playing on the home turf. They know their infrastructure, can have sensors and traps everywhere. The bad guys are stumbling in the dark. They have no idea what's real and what's a honeypot, what signals you're watching, etc.
The problem is that almost no one takes this advantage seriously. If you're not paying attention to your infra, yeah, you're gonna get owned.
Do you think Donnie loses a microsecond of sleep over this?
18F -> https://ndstudio.gov
As seen credited on recent publications like real realfood.gov.
(Ill note that this design studio is being led by newly proud white nationalist Joe gebbia who apparently blames illegal aliens and their ‘anchor babies’ for high housing costs apparently while unironically forgetting he cofounded airbnb: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VCGY!,w_1272,c_limit... - I mean look at these posts back to back, I wonder why they’re unable to recruit anyone: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ArmA!,w_1272,c_limit...)
Ridiculous that scumbags like this are tarnishing that space.
Thanks!
For instance, what’s mentioned in the article about not dealing with COM actors is great advice because chances are they’re going to keep your data and sell it or use it for future extortions no matter whether you pay.
Other actors though have a reputation to uphold to get paid and they know it.
An example of the process is something like:
1. Notification by ransom operators Including proof. Negotiations start at some arbitrary number like 6 percent of reported earnings.
2. Negotiators notified.
3. Back and forth begins. “This isn’t really that much data, do you have more? It’s not that damning. Fine, my client is willing to pay 50k. 60k? Okay, but you need to provide proof of how you got I the data so we can close the gap”.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ransomware-re...
https://complexdiscovery.com/a-48-month-federal-benchmark-re...
https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
We all gotta do what we can to get through the day, but you can't live next to someone who has the same challenge but a different answer to some trolly problem? Is your future world just a bunch of closed communities where outsiders and ideas and their differ skin color and economic background aren't welcome?
Or we pay the criminals, not let innocent people die because turbo nerds care about rewarding cyber criminals who will exist no matter what.
So I guess we should just let people die though, atleast the feds will have jobs and be able to go on vacation and not those damn criminals!! Although I fail to see much difference between US law enforcement and cyber criminals, both of their existence relies on the threat of violance and the extortion of the public with that violence.
Also I'm pretty sure the FBI gave birth to the shiny hunters if you look into it for more than 10 minutes. Its a bunch of kids they basically have chosen not to punish at various points in their criminal evolution. Its almost like they need these phenomenons to exist.
My ideal society is one without crooked cops, but alas I dont think that's likely either so in the meantime, until we can find a solution to that problem we probably shouldnt punish the innocent patients of hospitals.
It seems to me that money and the status of criminals is more important to you than human life, so we should probably deal with whatever brain worm has infected you too.
> When disagreeing, reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Linked at the bottom of the page.
It's a stupid what-if scenario. What if the ransomware attack doesn't kill anybody? What if the ransomware attack ends up saving a patient because the surgeon is given more time to think about a case so they don't make the mistake they would have? What if that hospital being shut down means a patient was sent to a different ER where the attending on duty was able to save the victim because of something unique to them from their past. What if one of the cyber criminals slips and falls on vacation with their stolen money? Are we supposed to be sad someone who inflicted pain on others died? Is all life sacred or not? Or is some more sacred than others?
I forget who off the top of my head where this is from, but a human life is worth about $10 million. So then if we're going to put this into economics, we should figure out how many people shutting down the hospital will kill and see how much the group is charging and compare the two, right?
How much of your money are willing to give the criminals for the hospital to stay open? How many nights are you willing to go hungry and stay in so that the criminals can walk free? Because if it's arbitrary money that's not yours, of course it's easy to give away. It's based on a facile understanding of the world though.
If nothing is more important than saving human lives, what are you doing on HN, not curing cancer right now? People are dying!
It's not a contest, we all can care and think deeply and still come to different conclusions.
One way to prevent this type of crime is to ensure that it is never profitable. The downside is that there will be losses until the message is thoroughly communicated.
Who cares if criminals have nice things, Id rather innocent people dont die. Most criminals tend to find ways to ruin their own lives at some point anyways. Peoples lives > pieces of paper.
Its like you're proposing a trolly problem where you choose the 5 people on a track to die because you don't want the single guy on a track to have nice clothes.
[0]: FBI arrests Canadian cybersecurity expert in ShinyHunters hacking case (6 points, 8 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50066759
I wouldnt really trust them under any admin, but yeah this current regime is definately will to play fast and loose with people's lives to make themselves seem competent.
Thered need to be changes in how lobbying and certain countries are registered to make a dent. Everyone says age but I dont think that matters as much as the lobbying industry. Young people are every bit as corruptible as the old.