How Bitcoin and Putin are enabling the wave of ransomware crimes | John naughton

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I just visited Kaseya’s website. We Are Kaseya, it’s chirping happily. Provide you with the best technologies that allow you to efficiently manage, secure and back up IT under one window.

Technology, he continues, is the backbone of all modern businesses. Small and medium-sized businesses deserve powerful, efficient, economical and secure IT security and management tools. Enter Kaseya. We exist to help multifunction IT professionals get the most from their stack of IT tools.

Translation: Kaseya produces remote management software for the computer industry. It develops and sells this software to remotely manage and monitor computers running Windows, OS X and Linux operating systems. As many organizations will grimly confirm, managing your own IT systems is a real headache. Kaseya therefore has many happy customers in the US, UK and beyond.

Or, rather, he did. On July 2, he was the victim of a ransomware attack that affected between 800 and 1,500 of his small business customers, potentially making it the largest ransomware attack ever. Such attacks are a form of kidnapping: intruders take control of an organization’s systems, encrypt its data, and demand payment (in cryptocurrency) in exchange for a key to decrypt hostage data. In an impressive YouTube video posted on July 6, Kaseyas chief executive Fred Voccola said the company shut down the compromised program within an hour of noticing the attack, potentially preventing hackers from reaching more customers. . By industry standards, it was an agile and intelligent response. Other victims like the Colonial pipeline operator and the recently affected Irish hospitals have been much more traumatized.

So what’s up? Basically what has happened is that, in a relatively short time, ransomware has become the new normal for organizations that depend on IT, which is basically every organization in the industrialized world. And the fact that this happened to Kaseya, as Voccola said, just means it’s the way the world we live in today is.

The attack on Kaseya affected between 800 and 1,500 of the companies it provides services to. Photograph: Dado Ruvi / Reuters

It is. So how did we come to this? Three major factors were involved. The first was the invention and development of cryptocurrencies. In the past, kidnapping was a risky business: the family could pay the ransom, but bundles of 20 bills were relatively easy to trace. Cryptocurrencies, on the other hand, are designed to be nearly impossible to trace, so there is no paper trail for the police to follow.

Ransomware is a bitcoin problem, says Berkeley researcher Nicholas Weaver, and doing something about it will also require disrupting the only payment channel capable of moving millions at a time outside of money laundering laws. : bitcoin and other crypto-currencies.

The second factor is that the ransomware has grown from an exploit for isolated cybercriminals to an industrialized enterprise. We saw it earlier with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks: once upon a time, if you wanted to bring down a server, you first had to assemble a small virtual army of compromised PCs to do your bidding; now you can hire such an army of robots by the hour.

The same goes for ransomware: There are a number of criminal gangs, such as REvil, that operate as companies providing what is essentially ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS). Criminals select a target and use REvils’ services in exchange for a share of the proceeds. Ross Anderson, professor of computer security at the University of Cambridge, sees this as a game-changer for the cybersecurity industry and he’s right.

The third factor is geopolitics. We live in a world that was created by the Peace of Westphalia, which in 1648 ended the Thirty Years’ War and established the system of sovereign states, which basically ensures that rulers can do whatever they want in their own jurisdictions. RaaS REvil operates in Russia, a jurisdiction ruled by an autocratic kleptocracy that has brilliantly harnessed digital technology for propaganda, disrupting democratic processes at home and abroad, and large-scale cyber espionage. The other day, for example, the NSA revealed that since 2019 Russian security agencies have been using a cluster of supercomputers to brute-force passwords on millions of Western online services. Since these machines can make millions of guesses every second, the chances of a normal password remaining secure are quite low.

The same goes for American, European or British law enforcement agencies to arrest and extradite beneficiaries of ransomware attacks against Western organizations, as Joe Biden arguably discovered when he met Vladimir Putin in Geneva the other week. So the only thing the REvil crowd needs to worry about right now is making sure they pay when Putin’s henchmen come in for his share of the crypto loot.

What i read

Unknown known Donald Rumsfeld, Rot in Hell. Ben Burgiss’ acerbic assessment in the Jacobin magazine of the late Donald Rumsfeld.

Joy of working from home Paul Krugman on Alexander Hamilton’s relevance to our Covid experience. Nice column from the New York Times.

Antagonizing Antifa People of Earth: Hello. Nice message from Will Stephen’s aliens in the New Yorker.

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