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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday June 22 2019, @02:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the it'll-get-worse-before-it-gets-better dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

A tale of two cities: Why ransomware will just get worse

Earlier this week, the city of Riviera Beach, Florida, faced a $600,000 demand from ransomware operators in order to regain access to the city's data. The ransom was an order of magnitude larger than the ransom demanded by the attackers that struck Baltimore's city government in May. Against the advice of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, the Riviera Beach city council voted to pay the ransom—more than $300,000 of it covered by the city's insurance policy.

Baltimore had refused to pay $76,000 worth of Bitcoin despite facing an estimated ransomware cost of more than $18 million, of which $8 million was from lost or deferred revenue. Baltimore lacked cyber insurance to cover those costs.

Riviera Beach is much smaller than Baltimore—with an IT department of 10 people, according to the city's most recent budget, and an annual budget of $2.5 million to support a total city government of 550 employees. (Baltimore has about 50 IT staffers supporting more than 13,000 employees by comparison.) It's not a surprise that Riviera Beach's leadership decided to pay, given that a full incident response and recovery would have likely cost two to three times what they've agreed to pay the ransomware operators, and half of that price tag is covered by insurance. So, Riviera Beach's decision to pay looks like the easiest way out. It's a decision that has been made by many local governmental organizations and businesses alike over the past few years.

Except, it probably isn't an easy way forward. Riviera Beach will still face the costs of fixing the security issues exploited by a phishing email opened by a police department employee. There's no guarantee that data was not stolen from the network, as apparently happened in Baltimore. And the paying of the ransom indicates the city doesn't have an effective disaster recovery plan. Without major upgrades, Riviera Beach could soon end up in the crosshairs of another ransomware attack—especially now that they've shown they'll pay.

Both the Riviera Beach and Baltimore ransomware attacks, along with the half-dozen known recent ransomware attacks against local governments, are indicative of just how unprepared many governments (and businesses) are for ransomware. Over the past few years, ransomware has exploded: data from the FBI shows that another organization is hit by ransomware every 14 seconds, on average. And this trend shows no signs of slowing—in fact, a new trend of targeted ransomware, seeking even bigger payouts, is emerging, in which more sophisticated organizations go specifically after businesses and other organizations more likely to pay out.


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @02:33PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @02:33PM (#858852)

    My wise old hacker (in the MIT tradition) friend always said,

    "Those who live by the un-backed-up hard disk, die by the un-backed-up hard disk.

    The only difference in this case is that innocent tax payers have to shoulder the cost. If I go to a town meeting, I think I'm going to ask them for details of their network backup.

    • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Saturday June 22 2019, @03:54PM (2 children)

      by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 22 2019, @03:54PM (#858863) Journal

      "Any data you have in only one place, you don't have"

      --
      В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @04:24PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @04:24PM (#858872)

        My hard drive got infested with mute ants, they would just pour in and out silently.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @12:56AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @12:56AM (#858973)

        You don't understand! These tech bro incels can be stopped by no man! Only a real man like Joe Biden can sniff out the female programmers we need!

  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @02:37PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @02:37PM (#858853)

    Wasn't something M$ was big on pushing in the 90s?

    But I'm getting old, that will be a battle the millennials will have to continue.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 24 2019, @06:00PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 24 2019, @06:00PM (#859430)

      So are the millennials: https://xkcd.com/2165/ [xkcd.com]

  • (Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday June 22 2019, @03:46PM (4 children)

    by looorg (578) on Saturday June 22 2019, @03:46PM (#858862)

    Is this why bitcoin are over $10k again? Ransomeware targeting townships all across the land (or western world or whatnot). Coincident?

    • (Score: 2) by canopic jug on Saturday June 22 2019, @03:57PM (3 children)

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 22 2019, @03:57PM (#858865) Journal

      Probably not. Bitcoin is far from anonymous. It is quite trackable. Some of the other cryptocurrencies do support anonymity. You'd have to check to see if they are on the rise instead.

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @04:48PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @04:48PM (#858881)

        Yeah, but tracking the transaction to "was spent in Romania" effectively means it was anonymous. Unless you taint all descendants from that transaction, and are able to recover money from criminal transactions from people who have later accepted tainted buttcoin. It may be possible to do that in highly regulated and policed countries like the US. In a way like if you accepted 5 cars in payment for a house, and one of the cars turns out to have been stolen, you eat the risk.

        I don't know to what extent they could just blacklist chosen transactions, ie all US regulated commerce must not accept descendants of x. It would split the network and cause rates of exchange to appear between US and other forks.

        If it were an honest means of exchange, then I think people would prefer the general safety of US buttcoin. In reality though, I think it would lose its base raison d'être to facilitate illegal transactions, and go to 0 value.

        • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:00PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:00PM (#858888)

          This is the best tl;dr I could make of your post, original reduced by 99%. (I'm a bot)

          Orange man bad. I love being scammed by banks.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @01:05AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @01:05AM (#858974)

            *snort* lol! oh my fucking god as Slen Orange Man plays the stock market by pushing around the Fed and Iran!

            There really is no shame in admitting that your NPU is damaged, fren.

  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday June 22 2019, @04:28PM (1 child)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 22 2019, @04:28PM (#858873) Journal

    There's no point in idiot proofing your network. Someone will breed a better idiot.

    • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Saturday June 22 2019, @09:41PM

      by krishnoid (1156) on Saturday June 22 2019, @09:41PM (#858938)

      There's better idiots, and better trained (better) idiots. Maybe:

      • The idiot users should start at the outer ring, moving in once they're better trained
      • The idiot sysadmins similarly
      • The idiot system architects, well, just convince the management that it's better off having no architect than an idiot one. Hopefully they'll understand by analogy to the damage that a bad city planner can do to the long-term functioning of a city.
      • The idiot management can be handed a book of best practices and convinced they don't know how to do anything better, under threat of having to activate their cybersecurity insurance
      • The cybersecurity insurers can require audits and adherence to best practices to offer insurability, increased payout percentages, and discounts

      And the rest of us can keep repeating this last sentence of the first paragraph [schneier.com] to everyone we talk to when security comes up.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Saturday June 22 2019, @04:40PM (1 child)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday June 22 2019, @04:40PM (#858878) Journal

    It is always a temptation
    For a rich and lazy nation...

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:45PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:45PM (#858896)

    There should be large personal penalties against people who fail to produce or provide proper funding for backups. The real culprit is their own incompetence and corruption. They make computer crime a very lucrative business. So, fuck 'em! Time for lawsuits, not compassion!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:51PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:51PM (#858897)

      It's a city. Someone else pays.

      You would hurt them more by forcing them to disband their 10 people IT team, and use some centralized state run system. Ten plum government jobs disappear, that will lead to a shakeup among the connected.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:59PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @05:59PM (#858899)

        They will all just be transferred to a new division of the code enforcement office.

      • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @06:44PM (3 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @06:44PM (#858905)

        It's a city. Someone else pays.

        Yeah, the voters. And they should pay for (re)electing incompetent and corrupt people. Make them think twice before voting themselves another handout.

        • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @08:45PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 22 2019, @08:45PM (#858929)

          This is incredibly important. The elected official may not have directly been the one who failed to patch a security hole, or the one who approved some service be left wide open, but they are responsible for the people who work directly under them and general policies. In practice, they bring in their buddies as higher ups, place a non-human over Human Resources, and then incompetence tickles down. They outsource projects to the lowest bidding drooling piece of shit in India, they spend more time counting beans then determining if a job is getting done right, creating insane employee policies so they can run off anyone they don't like, and then eventually get rid of anyone who actually knows how to do an actual job. Then when the shit hits the fan, they just find a few lowly peons to scapegoat and fire and then call it a day.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @08:19AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @08:19AM (#859035)

          In an election you do not get to pick from a wide field of qualified candidates, you usually get to pick from list of two morons who are willing to settle for stealing from your town, because the better town one zip-code over already has better thieves.

          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @03:32PM

            by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 23 2019, @03:32PM (#859082)

            That's bullshit. Anybody can get on a ballot with enough signatures on a petition. The voters are just too lazy to look beyond what is being spoon fed by their mass media. They would rather hear the comfortable lies from their favorite racist asshole.

            It takes a corrupt moron to elect and reelect a corrupt moron.

            Please stop making lame excuses

            Thank you

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