Slashdot Mirror

Would you trust the guys that infected your system, removed your access to files, ransomed the decryption key from you etc. to correctly - and perfectly - restore your untouched data?

Yes, I would. The original authors have (1) the most technical experience with their particular product and (2) strong financial incentive to provide a "good" extortion experience. By contrast, Talos is working from what they can reverse engineer, and they may not be aware of all variants/quirks of the malware.

Blocking the infection vector is infinitely more important than anything else.

They've already owned your machine with the payload of their choosing, and it's probably even self-updating. While I wouldn't exactly trust the malware folks to leave your machine clean, they already have the power to add whatever they want (whether you pay or not).

What's to say that their decrypt / encrypt routine isn't just a smokescreen to infect all your files with something else en-route?

Fair point, but it's more true for EXEs and DLLs than it is for Office documents and text files, so you could do some measured restoration. And again, if they've infected your machine already it would have been simpler and more successful to just silently compromise your files to begin with.

The option of "pay ransom" is really a sign that you've failed yourself.

That's for damn sure, but among homeowners and small business owners, how many people have the skills, time, and discipline to setup offsite, incremental, "pull" backups? And even a "pull" strategy (like mlts mentions in another comment) can be subverted if an attacker is clever enough.

Aside for those who want to get serious about backups: here's one strategy to consider. Combine with a weekly/monthly drive swap-out to offsite location for best effect, and remember that untested backups are no backup at all.

Did they just invent ETag or what? This "feature" is known for a few years and there are existing implementation, including this one: http://samy.pl/evercookie/ from 2010.

The wikipedia article on ETag links to a page from 2003 discussing ETag's usability for tracking.

Both are incredibly difficult to stop without also impacting useful functionality.

Wooo! Best mud ever.

http://mud.arctic.org/ port 2700

In high school, I was obsessed with a MUD called Arctic and introduced a bunch of my friends to the game. I enjoyed various aspects of it, probably most of all the ability to step outside my boring everyday life and be something extraordinary, but the most interesting aspect of it was the social engineering that occured. Eventually my whole group of friends got drawn in, and they probably all blame me for not getting laid in high school but that is besides the point; one of my friends latched on to the game not to enter a fantasy world but to use it as a test bed for human manipulation.

For him, the game was a test bed where he could determine what sorts triggers and levers people have and then see how he could manipulate them to his own end (no surprise that he loved "The Prince" when he read it). I came to appreciate the same things he did later on in my experience, although I never been the manipulating type. It's fascinating though, there are extraordinary leadership opportunities to be learned in these games a person need only the fortitude to deal with morons.

What MUD did you play and what was the medium age of the population?
Over the years on a mud called Arctic I played multiple female characters and none of that shit really occured. Then again I always soloed and had a tendancy to kill other people so maybe that was the source of the...distance....interesting ;)

muds... you should totally play muds. I don't know why a long term D&D player would necessarily even _want_ graphics. Myself, I hope to someday stop playing Arctic

Totally Arctic. I'd still be playing if it weren't a completely retarded thing to do with my time.

Lastly I'd personally want to see an economic model worth a damn.

Try Arctic. It's a MUD. I haven't played it in a while but the economy there was the best I've seen, both for equipment and for xp (and even large quantities of currency were hard to get, so that the coins were actually worth something rather than just being 'gamble money' like in games like Diablo 2). Good equipment there was really rare, because 1) it popped very rarely, and 2) the total number active in the game was capped. So you definitely wouldn't see 50 ppl running around with a "Death Sword of Thakisis" or stuff like that. You probably wouldn't even see one uber item cause they would only use it while doing really hard zones with their clan - otherwise the risk of being ambushed by other ppl just for the purpose of recovering that item was too great.

Add to that that some items could only be repaired in very hard to reach zones (read, you have to go there with a buff party of experienced players to stand a chance to make it to the shop), that others simply could not be repaired, and that all levied a 'rent' while you were away from the MUD which cost more (a lot more) for good items, and there's your balanced economy of scarcity.

I'm not sure why no other online game that I've seen so far has been able to reproduce that at all. Imho they should hire the people who designed Arctic and get them to balance their games for them.

Daniel

I disagree 100%. What's very important is to make absolutely certain that a player who's careful and quick enough can avoid being pk'ed - that there are no ways that you can be pk'ed without any warning. Ie, give every player a fair chance of getting out of it alive no matter how good the pk'er is.

However, making the pk onerous is a requirement for there to be pk's at all! For instance, in Diablo 2 (not hardcore mode though) there is no pkilling. It's all a joke, because you don't lose anything except a little bit of xp and some gold, so no one really cares about being pk'ed. On this mud I used to play, though, where you lost everything you were carrying, not to mention 1/3 of a level of xp (and there were only 30 levels overall, so that was a lot), and with the possiblity of losing stats points if you lost a level, dying *really* mattered. That gave you a very good motivation to:
1) Form groups of trusted players that you knew weren't going to pk you.
2) Be very aware of what other groups/clans/lone assholes were known to pk randomly so that you could get away quickly if you met them.
3) Never leave your character sitting on his ass in the wilderness - only do that in 'safe rooms' like the inn and the guilds and such, cause otherwise even a clueless newbie could kill you.
4) Always carry the essential stuff to get away from anywhere quick (ie several scrolls of recall, and wear a lucky charm to prevent other people from summoning you).

These all made the game much more fun, because there was an element of risk. I never saw a single person complain that this mud was not balanced pk-wise, though at some points in the faraway past (before I started playing it) it had some unbalances such as a clan taking over the fountain of a major city and charging coins to allow people to fill their waterskins, on penalty of death. Even that was referred to by all with some fondness though.

Even when I got pk'ed, I could always point the finger to one point where I panicked and didn't do the right thing or didn't know the right thing, and fucked up. I had the means to avoid pk. That's how it should be balanced.

Daniel

With any luck it will be supported by WineX. HL is.

Btw, re: MUDs, get away from those. They're the worst time sink ever invented (whether graphical or not). Here's a trick: MUDs really get you because they're an 'infinite' game (as opposed to a finite game that you play to win). That's how they get you addicted for such long times. To get out of it, my method was to change them (in my head) from an infinite game to a finite game. Once in the mindset of playing to win rather than playing to play, I played really intensively for a few weeks, and figured out how I could completely beat the one MUD I had found was really worth playing (Arctic). At that point, there was no point in playing anymore, as that would have been just a mechanical application of what I had figured out, with no 'new stuff' anymore, and at that point I stopped playing and never got back to those again.

Daniel

I'm in the same boat as the parent poster, mostly because I can't imagine paying per-month play charges. Can anyone fill me in on why EQ would be better or worse than a detailed, well-populated traditional mud? It seems like many of the complaints about EQ would fit into any laundry list of complaints about even the best ol' text based games, which have exactly the same 'addictive' draw but generally don't require you to shell out to Sony.

Honestly, I've been trying to give up Arctic for like 8 years now... would EQ be a decent crutch to wean myself with?

Let me say that again.

Laugh, it's a funny comment.

Funny like this web site: vi man

Again, pictures can be found here

This is mostly of the WTC in New York, and is not meant to be off topic, but the other thread is getting overloaded :(

here is the URL again:

http://www.arctic.org/~trockij/wtc/

My favorite of all time is Arctic. A close second is AnotherMUD, which lacks the quality and consistency of Arctic but makes up for it in pure fun.

And, of course, I must take this opportunity to pitch my own creation: Blood Dusk. It's offline for major upgrades right now, but check out the pages to get a feel for it...

"Rob is on leave from Transmeta Corp." it says on his homepage.