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Bitcoin's Fluctuations Are Too Much For Even Ransomware Cybercriminals (theguardian.com)
Bitcoin's price swings are so huge that even ransomware developers are dialling back their reliance on the currency, according to researchers at cybersecurity firm Proofpoint. From a report: Over the last quarter of 2017, researchers saw a fall of 73% in payment demands denominated in bitcoin. When demanding money to unlock a victim's data, cybercriminals are now more likely to simply ask for a figure in US dollars, or a local currency, than specify a sum of bitcoin. Just like conventional salespeople, ransomware developers pay careful attention to the prices they charge. Some criminals offer discounts depending on the region the victim is in, offering cheaper unlocking to residents of developing nations, while others use an escalating price to encourage users to pay quickly and without overthinking things. But a rapidly oscillating bitcoin price plays havoc with those goals, Proofpoint says.
OK, bitcoin is seriously running out of use cases. Despite its reported "value," it's becoming more worthless by the day.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Obviously a short-sighted bunch.
OMG facts!
We can't go back. The Sun is setting on this empire. Maybe the next one will get it right.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Cybercriminals = criminals that use computers.
Banks that don't use computers = haven't existed in decades. all banks us computers, yet we don't call them Cyberbanks.
Nobody says Cyberbusiness, or Cyberschool, or Cybermedicine.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"Ethical hackers"...
Indeed. You have to admire criminals that are willing to accomodate their victims' ability to pay.
Also, ransomware has some positive benefits. For so many areas of computer security, the cost of poor practices is externalized onto the innocent. This is true of data breaches, insecure devices used as spambots, etc. But with ransomware, the cost lands directly in the lap of the people failing to secure their systems and failing to run backups. So ransomware directly incentivizes better security practices that benefit everyone.
"Ethical hackers"...
But with ransomware, the cost lands directly in the lap of the people failing to secure their systems and failing to run backups.
...and then the cost is externalized to customers (aka "onto the innocent").
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Also, ransomware has some positive benefits. For so many areas of computer security, the cost of poor practices is externalized onto the innocent.
Just think of it as a whole world Chaos Monkey.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
OK, bitcoin is seriously running out of use cases. Despite its reported "value," it's becoming more worthless by the day.
"running out"? Its mostly been either a speculative instrument or a money transfer service. The former wants the volatility, the later doesn't really care so much since bitcoins are not held for any appreciable amount of time (immediately bought by person A, transferred, immediately sold by person B). The later is affected by the current high fees.
Buying pizza and other normal products and services is largely a stunt. Why would true believers use the bitcoins for ordinary purchases when they expect bitcoin prices denominated in dollars/euros/etc to jump up significantly? For the gray and dark markets, they're switching to other coins with better anonymity. Its sort of surprising ransomware had not done so, or maybe they still use bitcoin for "customer" convenience and convert to the more anonymous coins on their side?
So no, bitcoin is not very different now than in the past. These huge price drops are "normal". If I remember an Ars Technica article correctly the exponential price increases are typically (4 occurrences ?)) followed by a 75% drop in price. Ex the previous spike to around $1,000 a few years ago followed by a drop to around $250. If the pattern holds we might see something around $5,000 yet.
If a business could simply raise its prices, it would already do so. If they could charge a million dollars a pop, do you think they wouldn't already be doing that? Especially if a company has competitors which are unaffected. Would the company raise their prices and the competitors don't? What would the result of that approach be?
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Plenty of places where you can short hedge if the fiat value means anything.
That's just an inescapable fact though. You could just as easily say that the cost of having police is externalized onto innocent tax payers, but most people are reasonably in favor of having a legal system and officers of the law.
https://www.coindesk.com/the-f...
"We wanted to do a blockchain technology-related ETF, so not another bitcoin fund but something that takes advantage of the underlying ecosystem. So we developed a methodology in-house which measures seven quantitative factors and we run those factors on a universe of publicly traded [data]."
I trust them, they have quantified a universe after all.
A cybercriminal is committing a crime that fundamentally relies on computers: if you took the computer away, there would be no crime. The topic of this is hackers who illegally deploy software on a computer that illegally destroys data on that computer and demands that you convert money to a computer currency and pay it to a network of computers (because they all use bitcoin- they just started denominating the ransom demands in dollars so people can actually pay the ransom, because if you meant to ask someone for two thousand dollars and demand 1 btc, they'll never pay).
In the other cases, the fact that a computer is involved is incidental. The actions could exist without computers, they would just be less efficient. The realworld equivalent of ransomware doesn't exist, because people don't blindly follow orders from mysterious actors in the same literal fashion that computers do.
Is tether actually backed by USD? I just thought it was a giant scam.
bitcoin goes up
slashdot: bitcoin is a bubble this proves it!
bitcoin goes down
slashdot: the bubble popped, this proves it!
bitcoin goes up after going down
slashdot: bitcoin is too volatile, must be worthless!
Except because of transaction times, overhead, time until cashing in the coins, and volatility, it's impossible to accurately pay a value of X USD/X GBP/X Euro in bitcoin. Even Steam, a service that sells virtual goods and could therefore just take "tried to pay X" as good enough, no longer accepts bitcoin.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Nobody says Cyberbusiness, or Cyberschool, or Cybermedicine.
Speak for yourself, square!
*hikes up cyberpants* You kids git off my cyberlawn!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
So, when you get home one day and find your place picked clean, will you post an open thank you note to the burglars for teaching you an important lesson about what happens when you don't put bars on the windows?
The realworld equivalent of ransomware doesn't exist, because people don't blindly follow orders from mysterious actors in the same literal fashion that computers do.
Extortion. Confidence scheme. Some of what we call "cybercrime" are not really all that new. Certainly the anonymity and exploiting the general technology ignorance of average people help these tricks work.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Except because of transaction times, overhead, time until cashing in the coins,
Even shitty exchanges lock in the price at the time of your purported transaction. This has little to do with it.
volatility
This is half of the problem. The simple fact is nobody's going to pay you a bitcoin for a sandwich when that bitcoin could, tomorrow, buy three sandwiches. That's just fucking retarded.
The other half of the problem is the technology is shit, and transaction fees are beyond the realm of fucktarded. Nobody's going to pay you $20 in fees to buy a fucking sandwich.
Of course, magic woo is coming to fix BLOCKCHAIN and probably your local hosts file to boot, SOON(TM).
BTC isn't fucking currency, and anybody who says it is will probably offer you a great deal on a bridge that was only driven over by a little old lady going to church on Sundays.
and doesn't match with reality
Ask all the banks which received bailouts.
Ask Equifax.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
>One of the big things that most ransomware stories just gloss over, is how the attacker persuades the user to sudo apt-get install ransomware and enter their password. Why would I run ransomware?!
Because it's irrelevant to the story? Ransomware doesn't need any administrative privileges to inconvenience anyone, just the ability to trick a clueless user to run it, or piggyback off something legitimate and encrypt the users home.
eventually you will become a programmer of the blockchain. and then you will be empowered. and then you will innovate and invent new things
The blockchain and bitcoin are two very different things. Blockchain technology is highly likely to be part of our future. Bitcoin maybe not, it could easily be displaced some other coin with better security and better features. Bitcoin has various technical flaws, some make it insecure (ASIC mining), some make it impractical to use (fees). For example bitcoin is built on the assumption that miner cartels and governments can not manipulate it due to distributed mining (blockchain updates), ordinary people mining with their computers. Reality has deviated from this assumption, mining require expensive dedicated hardware (ASICs) that are only in the hands of relatively small number of people and they are overwhelming located in a single country and dependent upon inexpensive government supplied electricity. While cartel and government manipulation is unlikely, bitcoin's design assumes it to be virtually impossible. It is unlikely but plausible, the bitcoin blockchain is vulnerable.
A car analogy: Blockchain technology is like internal combustion engine technology. Bitcoin is like the Model T Ford, the first to get the attention of the public but entire replaceable by something newer, better performing and with more features. Network effect won't help bitcoin since there is little to no switching cost for a user to move to another coin.
On the nose.
I have been convinced for a long while that blockchain technology is important. What the last few weeks has convinced me is that Bitcoin itself is the walking dead. Because now that there is enough limelight to go around that some shines on its competitors, the low switching costs will mean Bitcoin will have to compete on its technical merit over the long haul. It cannot survive on the vacuous "gold standard of cryptocurrency" hype forever.
While we do not know exactly how "coin" will fit into the future ecosystems of blockchain technology, we have numerous reasons to suspect Bitcoin itself is ill-suited to succeed. Miners fleeing to greener pastures will drive the fees up and indirectly increase volatility, which will encourage normal consumers to shrug and choose something else. Eventually, it drifts down in transaction volume and price to where it is vulnerable to a run on the currency.
It has already started, in my opinion.
Without wanting to go into a discussion on technical merits, I see that many exchanges have started trading against Ethereum as well as bitcoin. Bitcoin transfers are also faster than bitcoin transfers, and MUCH cheaper. That alone will have a big influence because in the crypto community many people have started using ETH for storing value, making transfers and trading.
One day, people will wake up and figure out that there is nothing that bitcoin does that another coin does better, and that its only advantage has simply been that it was the first mover. When that happens, bitcoin will go down and another currency will be king.
It's more like an unlocked door with the key under the doormat and the door open wide.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If you think about it for a moment, most homes are trivial to break in to even if the door is locked. Any elementary school kid could do it. They don't because they're taught it's wrong and they would likely get in trouble. A computer that actually has a password on it is harder. The problem is the bad guys can reach it from across the world and know they WON'T get in trouble the vast majority of the time.
It's a neighborhood problem. If you live in a bad neighborhood, you lock your doors and make sure your windows are closed, make sure you have quality locks on the door AND the windows. Because in such a neighborhood, the next burglar could be standing right in front of your door in a minute.
And on the internet, you ARE in a bad neighborhood. Always. And ALL the burglars are standing in front of your door ALL the time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Which, by the way, is still faster than other form of "transfer without a central authority", like bank money transfer (from a day up to a couple of days).
So what? Over the course of a 3-4 days, exchange rates rarely vary by more than a percent or two. Bitcoin clearly has the ability to change by 10%+ or more within hours. That's apples to durians in comparison.
Worth noting that with bank transfers, the delay is built in to help mitigate fraud, unlike bitcoin's delay which is a bug not a feature. Banks could process the transfer almost immediately if they wanted to, bitcoin effectively cannot.
Which, by the way, is still within the same kind of margin that some central authority money transfers end up costing.
Not even close, though I'm not sure if that's a reference to transaction fees... it shouldn't be, because I never mentioned those.
I'm referring to the change in value of the currency being transferred. If I agree to pay you $5 and the value of my currency drops 50% by the time it shows up in your account, I've effectively only sent you $2.50.
Yes, that effect happens when moving between different currencies, but nowhere near as bad and nowhere near s often.
How are you supposed to *hide* movements of money, on a system whose entire purpose of existence is to replace central authorities, with a system where every single movement of money is broadcast to the entire network and kept in a distributed ledger by all nodes ?
Bitcoins are not associated to real identities and rely only on unique tokens. Tying transactions to individuals requires associating public wallet addresses with IP addresses.
Using VPNs/Proxies/Tor/Open hotspots obscures your identity a decent amount with relatively little effort. Using mixing services is effectively the Bitcoin equivalent to money laundering. You can get any number of addresses for transactions and, since there is no personal information associated with those addresses, you can easily confound attempts to track funds between a known payer and an unknown receiver.
Kind of the whole allure behind cryptocurrencies is how easily it is to foil attempts to track a transaction. You just have to be not stupid about it...
The whole point of bitcoin protocol is not to make transaction secret.
The point is to make transactions auditable, which is not the same as traceable. You can easily verify the history of funds being transferred from one account to another, but it's very difficult to track funds being transferred from one person to another.
=Smidge=
You'll also need to have a deadbolt on the door, the door needs to be steel, and you'll need bars on the windows. Now you're up to the level that it would take a middle school kid to break in and it'll take time and make some noise, or a high school kid might manage to pick the locks.
You're pretty bad at home security, it seems. Do you deserve to get cleaned out? I'm guessing you'll say no, and you'll be right. Same way nobody deserves one of those crypto extortion attacks.
Sorry to say it, but "deserving" it does not enter the equation. Welcome to reality, it has one quality: It isn't fair. What you "deserve" means diddly squat.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Let's put it this way, would you consider the burglars who cleaned you out to have done a public service like the person I replied to claimed?
You replied to me and I did not claim that.
What I claimed is that the internet IS a bad neighborhood, and that many people don't realize that. It's, funny enough, part of my job to raise awareness for this, and no, I don't think anyone "deserves" getting swindled, conned or tricked out of their money. But I do think that everyone deserves the information that this is a problem and I also think that everyone should be aware that this is a problem and behave accordingly.
When I read about people losing thousands of dollars to Nigerian-Prince scams or other burglary-by-email con artists I sway between anger and frustration. We keep telling people to not fall for those bullshit tricks and people are still motivated mostly by greed, fear and greed.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I replied to ShanghaiBill, then you replied to me. The nice thing about web fora is that they keep a transcript. Perhaps you should scroll up and read it.
I am well aware that the internet is a lot like a bad neighborhood, I see logs of mostly lazy attempts at root passwords and such daily. I too urge better security. Unlike SB, I see no benefit to ransomware to anyone but the scumbags that collect the ransom.