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Attackers DDoS WannaCry Kill Switch (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes VentureBeat:
As of late Friday, after many of the deadlines threatening data deletion had passed, few victims had paid ransoms. According to Elliptic Enterprises, only about $94,000 worth of ransoms had been paid via Bitcoin, which works out to less than one in a thousand of the 300,000 victims who were reportedly affected by WannaCry... While not as bad as feared, ransomware (not to mention cybersecurity threats in general) isn't going away. Wired reported that the domain registered by Hutchins has been under intense denial-of-service attacks delivered by an army of IoT devices marshalled, zombie-like, by Mirai.
The problem with democracy is voters are sports fans and they turn every election into a team sporting match.
If I had the money to borrow Mirai, I can't imagine a more amusing thing to do than to poke holes in the WannaCry Dam. I tip my hat to whoever is behind this evil scheme.
Less than one in a thousand is a typical 'success' rate for any scam. Given that this is a worm, the cost of propagating to those 300k devices was almost nil after it was done being coded. Considering the attack used publicly-released exploits, pretty much every other component could've been sitting in a drawer using 95% reused code chunks.
It's not like Silicon Valley contractors were paid to code this thing, some 3rd-world hacker (possibly unemployed) threw it together; the cost of creation is way under $94k, I suspect. The NSA probably paid 10x that to find the exploits, and who knows if they ever got to use them.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Law of Large Numbers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
I thought the "kill switch" just attempted to resolve the domain name which is why just registering the name was enough to activate it. If that's the case, what's the point of the DDoS other than just being a dick overall?
Between antifa's brown shirt tactics (literally, they wear actual brown shirts while parading around with weapons and threatening people) and people like yourself that can't stop obsessing over that idiot, I'm thinking Trump is the least of our problems.
$94k is not a bad payout. Sure they hoped for more, and the worm was very successful and could've yielded more. But publicity is the enemy of every good scam, so typically, they actually do not want their scam to make headlines.
Given all that, they still made the equivalent of a yearly salary on this thing, and without the inconvenience of paying taxes or having to show up in the office. Any indy mobile games developer would be happy with getting that return from a game.
Ransomware is here to stay. But maybe with the large number of victims this time, people will actually demand that software vendors start to provide something that is better than utter crap? That we have a very serious issue in software quality and we can't afford to bet our economy, social networks and basically all of civilisation on something that's made cheap and fast (you know the third that wasn't picked).
We need some basics done right in software, and that means re-engineering a big part of it. We need to understand trust levels, MLS or its variants. We need to get away from the user model we have, where users are treated as either complete idiots or all-knowing gods. We need to get our shit sorted out instead of pushing the next shoddy "disrupting product" out the door in search of a quick buck and a profitable IPO.
Maybe if something besides $$$ still had a value in this society...
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Criminals gonna criminal.
Seriously, though, the makers of the ransomware are criminals. It's not entirely unrealistic to think they're also the type who would DDoS.
And the DDoS is probably less of a crime than the ransomware.
All of this assumes that the (in my opinion likely) possibility that the DDoS and ransomware are coming from the same person or people.
As the article points out, a big part of the reason is that people disable automatic updates. This should never be done, but I can understand. Automatic updates are rude. They change and break things. Windows updates got kinda nicer last few years (after you disable automatic reboot http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/d... ), but all other software updates are still crap. Every time I run a third-party sofware update (Adobe, Flash, etc.), it breaks and resets things. No I don't want a new UI for Acrobat that makes the icons twice the size (nope, forced). No I don't want the load-at-boot reinstalled (nope. reinstalled. fire msconfig and regedit to get rid of it). No I don't want to reinstall the auto-update (ditto). No I don't want my print settings reset to default (nope, done). And crap like that, every time. This is a price for security that we should not have to pay.
17779 eligible voters in a district, 17779 'vote' as one. This is Russia.
Don't worry, AI will save us. I keep having flashbacks to the late 70's show with Gil Gerard and Erin Gray listening to Theo explain diplomacy to ignorant masses .
you honestly believe this isn't the original jerk behind the ddos?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
It has always been WannaCrypt, WannaCry for short.. see it now?
Antifa's are a strawman being stood up being the alt-right as something to make them look like the victim. They aren't a serious movement.
Have gnu, will travel.
That's bullshit! Reveton back in 2012 used to demand Ukash or Paysafecard.
The Dragonball Law?
If techs didn't disagree with each other, then Microsoft would rule the world.
Sure. It's a business. They invested the time to make a virus that works, why not try to make as much money off it as they can. I'm surprised they haven't re-launched it. New kill switch.
Trump's a bitch but not a bigger bitch than his pathetic voters.
I know. It's like he's always crying right?
"Boo Woo. Poor me. Nobody's fair to me. This is a witch hunt." And on and on.
He never misses a moment to let us know how difficult life is for him. And he's got the look of someone who cries every night. Such weak talk. Poor little underdog.
Just look at his wife. You can just see that she is sick of hearing his whining at night and crying into pillows.