Who's Profiting From The WannaCry Ransoms? (cnn.com)

CNN reports: For months, the ransom money from the massive WannaCry cyberattack sat untouched in online accounts. Now, someone has moved it. More than $140,000 worth of digital currency bitcoin has been drained from three accounts linked to the ransomware virus that hit hundreds of thousands of computers around the world in May.
Meanwhile, a Ukrainian law firm wants NotPetya victims to join a collective lawsuit against Intellect-Service LLC, the company behind the M.E.Doc accounting software, said to be the point of origin of the NotPetya ransomware outbreak. An anonymous reader quotes BleepingComputer: The NotPetya ransomware spread via a trojanized M.E.Doc update, according to Microsoft, Bitdefender, Kaspersky, Cisco, ESET, and Ukrainian Cyber Police. A subsequent investigation revealed that Intellect-Service had grossly mismanaged the hacked servers, which were left without updates since 2013 and were backdoored on three different occasions... The Juscutum Attorneys Association says that on Tuesday, Ukrainian Cyber Police confirmed that M.E.Doc servers were backdoor on three different occasions in an official document. The company is now using this document as the primary driving force behind its legal action.
The law firm says victims must pay all of the court fees -- and give them 30% of any awarded damages.

Comments

Who is profiting?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the attorneys. And the court system, more generally. Parties to the suit? They all end up in the hole.

Re:Who is profiting?

[BarbaraHudson]

Sounds like the attorneys. And the court system, more generally. Parties to the suit? They all end up in the hole.

Of course the game is rigged, especially in this case. You're paying the legal fees up front, and there's no guarantee that what you'll recover will be enough to even get your money back.

If software were to be developed that way, the deal would be "You pay me to develop the software and bill you at $300 an hour and up, plus all expenses, and also give me 30% of all revenue, if any."

Re:Who is profiting?

[ShanghaiBill]

Sounds like the attorneys.

That is not necessarily bad. If criminals are forced to pay lawyers, that is still a deterrent to crime. You should think of these lawsuits as the outsourcing of law enforcement to the private sector.

Re:Who is profiting?

[ShanghaiBill]

You're paying the legal fees up front

I know nothing about the Ukrainian legal system, but in America most class action lawsuits are 100% contingency. There are no up-front fees.

Re:Who is profiting?

[Swave An deBwoner]

And the victims get a 10% discount on future purchases (or services) from the company that bilked them in the first place.

Class action suits were a great idea when they were used for social benefit like going after polluters who were untouchable by individual victims, but these days they seem to be mostly moneymakers for the legal firm that handles the lawsuit premised on some minor impropriety (or none sometimes) of the defendant entity.

It looks like this Ukrainian legal group just found a more profitable way to skin their clients.

Charging all fees plus 30% ?

[qwerty shrdlu]

Trust me, this is the kind of law firm that will take a lot more than 30%.

Re:Charging all fees plus 30% ?

[ShanghaiBill]

Trust me, this is the kind of law firm that will take a lot more than 30%.

As they should. A lawsuit like this takes a lot of time and money, and has a high probability of netting $0. So the contingency has to be high to make it worthwhile.

In a class action, if another qualified law firm is willing to do it for less, the judge can allow them to represent the class instead.

For the injured parties, 70% of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Re:Unbelievable

[Trax3001BBS]

APK hosts file generator makes me immune from such attacks. No ones gonna profit from me!

This came my way http://i64.tinypic.com/152p9nb... (cloudfront.net of course). It was searching the number I came across many who paid a lady who knew little english.

Me? I was running Linux Mint it crashed Flash with a segfault (buffer overflow), and let me down load a small html file that said little.

Re: "sat untouched in online accounts"

[DontBeAMoran]

By saying things like "why exactly wasn't the money seized" you are showing your ignorance and then complaining about things you do not understand.

Re:"sat untouched in online accounts"

[ShanghaiBill]

And why exactly wasn't the money seized?

To seize the money you would need one of two things:
1. The cryptographic keys
2. Cooperation of the majority of the miners that control the blockchain.

The miners have precisely zero incentive to cooperate. If they agreed to compromise the integrity of the blockchain, it would have a huge negative effect on the value of the currency.

Re: "sat untouched in online accounts"

[DontBeAMoran]

Just because it's "on the line" doesn't mean they have the cryptographic keys to do anything about it, grandpa.

140k is peanuts

[gweihir]

Seriously.

Re:140k is peanuts

[schleimkeim]

I'm not sure if you're trolling, or if you're actually a complete moron.