It should be possible to follow the money. Bitcoin is only semi-anonymous. If you have a large number of transactions to track, it should be possible to figure out where the money is going.
*Note - I'm not endorsing droning ransomware dirtbags
Wars have and will be fought over economic sabotage, with "non-violent offenders" inciting them. At some point it is possible that cybercrime could become enough of a problem that it would have dramatic effects on a nation's economy, then it's only a small step away from said country taking matters in to it's own hands.
If there are enough transactions, you can follow the money through a mixer. You'll see coins going into the mixer, and, after a while, items that sum to the same amount minus the laundering fee coming out. It's statistically noisy, but that's what big data is for.
The lesson here is that you should backup your files on a cloud storage service that has version history for all files, preferably for a period longer than 30 days.
Cloud backups don't suit every scenario though. The video editing studio here got a new 40TB storage device and filled it in months, and are talking about going bigger next time. They are struggling on rural Australian internet with a service that varies between 10 and 2mbit depending on the weather, often with high degrees of packet loss.
Multiple "experts" have walked through the door and demanded they move all backups to various cloud based services. Trying to tell people that some great solutions aren't always great for every scenario is like talking to a wall.
Notably, the top 3 ransomware tools they mention are Windows only (Locky, TeslaCrypt, CryptoWall). And that's not just because of platform popularity.
There was recently a case of Mac ransomware (KeRanger) but it was not via a phishing email. It was considerably harder to distribute because Mac users can't simply run unsigned software downloaded from the internet (by default). The attacker got control of an app developer signing certificate and hijacked their software update to deliver the ransomware. It was halted as soon as the the certificate was revoked.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 50.6 ms ] threadIt should be possible to follow the money. Bitcoin is only semi-anonymous. If you have a large number of transactions to track, it should be possible to figure out where the money is going.
Wars have and will be fought over economic sabotage, with "non-violent offenders" inciting them. At some point it is possible that cybercrime could become enough of a problem that it would have dramatic effects on a nation's economy, then it's only a small step away from said country taking matters in to it's own hands.
Not to mention, it only takes a single mistake.
You don't want crypto-ransomware able to get to your keys to the backups.
Multiple "experts" have walked through the door and demanded they move all backups to various cloud based services. Trying to tell people that some great solutions aren't always great for every scenario is like talking to a wall.
There was recently a case of Mac ransomware (KeRanger) but it was not via a phishing email. It was considerably harder to distribute because Mac users can't simply run unsigned software downloaded from the internet (by default). The attacker got control of an app developer signing certificate and hijacked their software update to deliver the ransomware. It was halted as soon as the the certificate was revoked.