L.A. Hospital Pays Off Ransomware Thieves To Reclaim Its Network (google.com) 159
Los Angeles' Presbyterian Medical Center, the target of a successful ransomware attack (successful from the thieves' point of view, that is) has buckled under: to regain control of its network, the hospital has paid a 40-bitcoin ransom (about $17,000) to the gang responsible. That, at least, is a far cry from the much higher ransom widely reported to have been initially demanded: 9,000 bitcoin. (That would have meant a payment of $3.6-3.9 million.)
Preeeecious (Score:4, Insightful)
They fed the trolls.
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D. Trump, the first Troll President?
No, the Constitution clearly states that only Lizard People can be presidents.
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If by "they", you mean the FBI paid the ransom to see where it goes, then yes, "they" fed the trolls.
and now, airgap the hospital (Score:2)
take it off the web.
At that price... (Score:2)
Cheaper to pay than to fix it themselves. Yes?
Re:At that price... (Score:4, Informative)
By an absolute mile. At $17,000 you would just pay it straight away. They would have lost far more as a result of the systems being offline, and assuming the ransomware had got itself all through they systems it would have been orders of magnitude more to clean the system if it was even possible.
Re:At that price... (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this does assume that the ransomers won't come back and ask for more money next week.
Re:At that price... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:At that price... (Score:5, Informative)
It's a short-sighted solution though. Their systems are still vulnerable, probably even still infected. And they validated the business model of the attackers, so more attacks will be coming.
Also, while the CEO insists that hospital records were not compromised, I'm reading that as "the attackers weren't interested in hospital records", not "the hospital records were safe".
Re:At that price... (Score:4, Insightful)
Short sighted from an industry view, probably not from the hospitals view. You would hope they have air gapped their network from the internet at this stage while they reappraise their security and plug holes. From my understanding the ransomware attackers don't normally attack the same target twice as you are less likely to pay up if you think it will happen again. So this should protect them from the current infection.
It also wouldn't surprise me if patient records were untouched. Those are probably behind higher levels of security than the rest of the network. What I suspect happened is they lost a way of accessing them because all their other systems went down.
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It also wouldn't surprise me if patient records were untouched. Those are probably behind higher levels of security than the rest of the network. What I suspect happened is they lost a way of accessing them because all their other systems went down.
If they were accessing the patient records from compromised systems, then the patient records were not safe, even if the records server itself wasn't infected.
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Not necessarily at all. If you access the patient records via a citrix system for example there would be no reason to believe the patient records were compromised just because the host machine was. This can also be extended to applications that communicate with a database server. There is nothing that prevents that being encrypted every step of the way.
The only way would be via screenshots and your data rate would be terrible.
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If such a remote desktop is authenticated via password, a key logger on the compromised machine could capture it. That combined with the records system being accessible from the compromised network means the attackers could start their own remote desktop session to the records system.
NO WAY! (Score:2)
NO WAY! You mean that if I compromise a system with access to ANOTHER system, that I can compromise the second system?!?!?
That's fucking magic! ...Or so i am led to believe...
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And given that it's ransomware it doesn't have to include a back door component. It might even be smarter not to include a back door as it gives fewer traces back to the exploiter for the authorities to follow.
The software just has to get onto a machine, even if air-gapped, and encrypt files and then prompt the user to contact some address for the key to decrypt the files.
So even if the patient data isn't encrypted it is quite possible that no data left the hospital network.
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It's true that that's a good assumption to make but there's no real way to know if they had anything with a greater complexity than simply encrypting via remote. I've actually seen/read some of the malware that is out there - it was actually up on GitHub and at PasteBin. I can't actually say, for certain, what it was but it is pretty simple. It's not nearly as complicated as one might think - and it doesn't actually do anything more then just encrypt.
Basically, the two samples that I've seen did this:
Get at
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Not likely the internet is used for insurance verification, patient record requests, remote data access for physicians at their offices and billing. There's certainly a bunch of other things that aren't on the top of my head.
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Beats me. I am not a lawyer, but I would guess whoever has the deepest pockets.
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And there are only those attackers, naturally. No others will be informed where to find those, who are willing to pay, and what to do for that.
So, they just integrated terrorism into their business as usual. What perspectives this does actually open?
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From my understanding the ransomware attackers don't normally attack the same target twice as you are less likely to pay up if you think it will happen again. So this should protect them from the current infection
The same ones may not come back but I can guarantee their competition has recognized an easy mark. Expect bible salesmen any minute!
Re: At that price... (Score:1)
$17,000 isn't that what the average US hospital charges for a roll of toilet paper?
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Unfortunately, it is cheaper. It's not just the cost, the medical staff can't do much to admit or treat patients without the electronic medical record system. They have patients waiting for surgery, procedures, med orders, etc.
It's also unfortunate because it creates a precedent. It's a no-win situation for that hospital.
How much is that in commodity medical supplies? (Score:5, Informative)
>> the hospital has paid a 40-bitcoin ransom (about $17,000)
That's about 340 tablets of hospital aspirin or 680 hospital bandaids for those counting at home.
Re:How much is that in commodity medical supplies? (Score:5, Funny)
17 of those Shkreli specials.
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That's about 340 tablets of hospital aspirin or 680 hospital bandaids for those counting at home.
At the negotiated Medicare discount price.
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Never to worry; when Trump the Magnificent Negotiator comes to power, he'll negotiate those prices down to no medicare system at all.
He'll build a wall around hospitals and let poor people pay for it.
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Or in Canada, assuming a $17K USD value of 23217.75 Canadian Dollars and a retail price of $12.99 [well.ca] for 200 tablets of regular strength Aspirin (without taxes), that's about 1787 boxes x 200 tablets = 357400 tablets.
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Or in the UK, assuming $17K USD is £11,873.30 (xe.com conversion) - that's 400,545 tablets at retail prices in our local supermarket.
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Why shouldn't it be considered a general salary? The salary is paid regardless of whether the nurse is delivering the drug or not.
Anyway, so lets take a salaried nurse at £23,000 a year (neither the lowest nor the highest wage for a nurse in the NHS), and lets assume it takes 5 minutes for the nurse to prescribe, fetch and hand the drug to the patient.
The figure you are asking for is ... £0.97p for two aspirin.
Most of that is in the nurses salary. And that's ignoring the fact that my previous
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It takes a special talent to miss the point so completely.
While it is true you can buy aspirin over the counter for a fraction of a penny per pill, that is not the same price you will be billed if you are hospitalized in the US and a nurse gives you the exact same aspirin. OP suggested, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, a price of $50 USD per pill. That's only about twice as much as reported here. [healthcare...cenews.com]
In L.A. I would not be surprised if they charge $50 per aspirin.
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Not my fault if you live in a you're-poor-so-you're-going-to-die country.
In real countries, health care is free and everyone is billed a small amount.
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It's one thing to go into CVS and take a bottle of aspirin off a shelf next to all the other OTC remedies.
It's something else again to go into a hospital pharmacy and take a bottle of aspirin off a shelf next to a lot of drugs that could kill you.
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the hospital has paid a 40-bitcoin ransom (about $17,000)
That's about 340 tablets of hospital aspirin or 680 hospital bandaids for those counting at home.
What you're saying seems to imply a really interesting price structure: 340 Aspirin tablets for $17000? Or are we talking about a seriouosly hefty kind of portable computing device called 'Aspirin'?
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Can you convert that to Danegeld?
So, will they ever spend these bitcoin? (Score:5, Interesting)
And, can the FBI monitor the blockchain to get IP addresses where these coins were accessed from when the hospital handed them over?
Re:So, will they ever spend these bitcoin? (Score:5, Funny)
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The perps are most likely under the personal protection of Putin. Good luck extraditing them.
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Bitcoin doesn't work like that. Maybe if you had an omnipotent view of the whole internet to see where a transaction actually originated from. But even then it's trivial to just use Tor.
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With the omnipotent view, Tor doesn't work either - and there are few enough Tor nodes that it would not be surprising for most of them to be monitored and recorded.
The Bitcoin blockchain is inherently public knowledge - key component of how the system works. If you want to do a transaction, you have to interact with the blockchain - infact, if you want to "act normal and blend in" you advertise your proposed transaction publicly. The coins paid as ransom are known to the persons who gave them away... onl
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That's not how anything related to bitcoin works.
Now What? (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sure that they are going to take the $3.6 million that they didn't have to pay during this episode and devote that to upgrading and securing their systems to prevent the possibility of future attacks like this. That would be the smart thing to do.
Right?
Re:Now What? (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, that is only $8k per bed, or likely around $800/employee. Hell, it is really only two FTEs for the next 5 years...
A grossly flawed system is much more expensive to fix than that. Maybe they could afford a backup system that is resistant to bitlocker though...
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I've done them. Like good password policies, the upfront cost is often refused.
Re:Now What? (Score:5, Informative)
lol, I've seen some major hospitals that have 2 entire IT people on staff (an admin and an assistant)... I applied for a network admin position at a hospital with 2 IT employees (though I didn't know that until the interview) for 400 employees and well over 300 connected systems (from tablets doctor's used, to connected hardware, routers, and servers of various types, as well as dedicated workstations for nurses). They also used highly specialized systems that were extremely complex. Oh and did I mention satellite officers for doctor's that are part of their network, but not onsite? Yeah... Huge mess there.
Because obviously all this tech in a modern hospital can just work on it's own. No one ever wants to keep enough IT staff on hand to deal with regular maintenance because that would take away from executive bonuses. Hospitals are not any different, even as they are required to push further into the digital realm. This is the direct result. Oh and they don't even usually pay that well. Heck I think half the interviews I've had with companies lately are just to 'prove' a native worker wasn't 'qualified' to do the job even though my resume is solid. Good luck to the sucker form India getting those jobs.
Correct (Score:2)
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Re: Correct (Score:2)
Nope. IT department got the blame and will probably be axed for an Indian team. Seen it before
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I am one of three desktop support on a campus of 3,500 machines spread across 10 buildings with an additional ten satellite sites and we manage just fine, though we do have 2-3 interns from time to time to help. On the other hand, another campus near us has an incredible staff of over 300 to manage less than double the machines we do, and many over there consider themselve extremely overworked. "Work smarter, not harder", the job is only as difficult as you make it. Proper application of automation and c
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One needy doctor can occupy 25%+ of an IT support FTE when they get "in the zone." If you've got a research program on-campus with 20+ docs, an admin + assistant will not keep the hungry fed.
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It's called I wrote it at midnight and was half asleep. Then again after a car accident I have very minor brain damage that causes me to reverse the placement of letters when I'm typing at times, so typos are extremely common for me anyways.
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Backups? (Score:5, Informative)
Good god, doesn't anyone keep backups anymore?
Re:Backups? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes. I have backups. You have backups. You're modded down to 0 for a perfectly reasonable question.
I'm sure I'll soon join you.
Meanwhile the dipshits that run public hospitals DON'T have a usable backup strategy, pay trolls ransom,
and the new slasdhdot posts it as if it's big news.
Big news would be if someone actually had a backup and DIDN'T pay the ransom... or if they got LEOs
to actually FIND the bad guys. Paying ransom... heck, even the LEOs pay ransom. https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
E
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There is no simplified mapping between my awareness and danger-exposed user end. We had recently ransomware visit, too. Hi, Russia!
One should not feed terrorist at any cost.
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You see, everyone is using computers nowadays. Everyone. Which means, that you are actually dealing with the whole spectrum of users, that's given. As an IT administrator, I am given that given, too. Of course, there are some users that are not able to handle one challenge or another, or nearly any sometimes.
It's us, IT guys, who keep backups for those users (well, best of us do). There is no good mapping in that structure, if it is mature enough to be of structured kind.
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IT guys sit in a small room in a cellar, but more and more it is them who actually run things.
Re:Backups? (Score:5, Interesting)
Except for one file which she had been working on the day the ransomware hit, and thus hadn't been backed up. As it turned out, the ransomware authors had programmed it to allow the victim to decrypt one file - to prove that it could in fact be decrypted, and hadn't just been deleted. So she of course chose that file to decrypt, and ended up with no data loss. The only loss was she couldn't work for a day.
That's why you never hear stories of competent IT saving the day. When they do, it's a non-event about as serious as someone calling in sick for a day. It's only when they fail that the problem becomes serious enough to be news-worthy.
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Not quite so, you oversimplify on your modest experience. Backup storage has limits. Information tends to ever grow. I intentionally skip large multimedia files, like collection of pictures from company parties, for example, from backing - to have vital things on backup media. Thus, when ransomware hits, and you have network share content completely encrypted, you still have stuff to sort, and keep all the share users off bay, until situation is investigated and put back under (some) control. While people r
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Anyone who has over 1GB of "valuable business information" is either archiving video, or doing it wrong. The age old strategy of hourly backups for 24 hours, daily backups for a week, weekly backups for a month, monthly backups for a year, and annual backups beyond 12 months only requires 45x the storage space of the original, and backups can be compressed.
A $99 2TB drive should be able to easily store 25GB of valuable data, backed up hourly - for all the hours that matter to anyone.
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When you have reality client with the mission on profit, who does not want to spend on new backup equipment before seeing old one definitely die, does not want to spend on outsourced services beyond the utmost necessity, but naturally has ever growing set of files - you have reality looking into your face for some reasonable choices. Then you do the best, you can, but it is not dream come true.
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Clients who waste breath about whether or not $99 is "worthwhile" to spend to safeguard their data deserve what they lose.
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I do realize that:
a) The $99 investment is vulnerable when it is mounted, not when it is inaccessible
b) Attackers are unlikely to dig so deep into the system that they find locally developed backup schema, and then demonstrate the patience to wait for the backup to come online or the creativity to figure out if/how to force backups online for encryption
c) I've set up two such $99 drives at home to do daily mirror backup of each-other, it took about 2 hours of internet research to learn how to do this "from
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And, I return to the sentiment, if the corporation cares so little for their data (or, perhaps would be happier if it were lost), then they get what they deserve.
My main point is that backup storage is so ridiculously cheap now, compared to 10 or 20 years ago, and you get "working storage" instead of some flaky, slow tape drive.
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The key component of "my setup" is: internet connectivity.
My home is not subject to flood, but if I cared enough to protect from fire, burglary, etc. the rsync job would be mirroring to a drive in another location. When I did the "professional" setup, we did just that, the working drive on-site, and the mirror at the President's house connected by VPN.
If the "corporation" with such limited budget also has only a single, flooding, building in which everyone works and lives, then they really should consider
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By the way key reliance on Internet connectivity is synonymous to the key exposure to vulnerabilities, that's inevitable.
Absolutely, though I find it amusing that I have run dozens (maybe hundreds, by now) of computers "internet connected" behind a simple router/firewall and not had a single "intrusion" issue since our first connectivity in 1995 or so, yet other people who take serious precautions with virus scanners, OS level firewalls, etc. experience such problems with security. The key to safety when using any powerful tool is to keep the controls protected from people who might misuse the tool. A point-to-point VPN tun
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I get the picture, but it's clear that the large growing corporation is having difficulties with priorities. There is an "appropriate level of risk" to each area of a business. The reason leaders are expected to have an "MBA" style education is to give them some insight in to each area of the business so that they can make appropriate judgements as to how much risk should be tolerated in each sector. Great leadership will learn on the job about each area of the business, taking input from the people who
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Growth is challenging, but it's a better problem than lack of revenue, or unpredictable sales.
Middle management takes the occasional bashing as "useless," but in my experience, bad middle management is indeed useless while good middle management can secure their departments the resources they need and protect them from unreasonable expectations and demands.
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(this is why companies like to buy a bunch of identical Dell systems)
I used to work for a small company of around 100 people, mostly engineers. IT would buy every single person a laptop (90 % of them were identical) with a 3-4 year warranty. Those warranties are like $800 and the computers are like $3000 tops. When an engineer had a hardware problem, they would be without their computer for like a week minimum (usually, they would get some ancient loaner, and it could be a few days labor to even update a computer to work with all the different systems anyway).
Why they didn't
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Here's the key:
usable backup strategy
I'd be willing to bet they _thought_ they had one and just got showned how inadequate it is. Of course, patient care was not compromised - that would make them (relatively more) vulnerable to lawsuit from all the bad outcomes that happened during the service outage...
Re:Backups? (Score:4, Informative)
A common strategy here is to encrypt to files, insert a transparent decryption layer, and then wait a few months before yanking the decryption. Backups are no good because they're encrypted too.
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I wouldn't count on version control to save you. If the transparent decryption layer sits between the actual data and the version control, everything will look fine... until it isn't. Though it might work if the version control was sending the unencrypted files to a server.
Probably your best bet is to have regular, multiple backups, and test the backups on another computer. If you find the backup is encrypted, the previous backup should still be okay.
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Yes. I have backups. You have backups. You're modded down to 0 for a perfectly reasonable question.
Anonymous Cowards start at 0. There are no negative mods whatsoever on the grandparent post.
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I've wondered about law enforcement on events like this. Who would handle it? The local police force is, for the most part, going to be unable to assist. Some larger cities may have computer crimes units with the skill sets to investigate and address these things but jurisdictions are going to be a massive problem - some (most?) of the gangs running these things are international. No way the local PD is going to get any traction there. If it's domestic and a gang that spans multiple states/jurisdictions the
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That's expensive (Score:2)
Just for shit and giggles I'd like to see someone ask a ransom of 1 million Dogecoins instead.
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ef46a09784cd9fe65c547972f916eb2c
Your post has just been encrypted with an unbreakable MD5 algorithm! Only I have a the key!
Pay me 1 million Dogecoins to get your post back! My address is DHrB6mgSAgwGiKw3YKn2VrN9PPq3bbHCFx
Wow
Such ransom
Many encryptions
Wow
The solution to ransomware... (Score:3, Insightful)
... is for someone to figure out an efficient way of tracing the full transaction history of any given "coin." Yes, I know that "in theory" it's do-able but it's just plain not feasible right now.
Yes, I know BC "coins" as such don't have a history, but transactions do. If a coin is the "output" of a transaction then its "parent coins" are all the coins that went into the transaction, in proportion to each other. Yes, you can "launder money" but all that does is "spread the dirt around" resulting in "slightly dirty" BC that are considered only as fractionally valuable as their "clean" fraction.
For example, if a ransomware victim, in cooperation with the police, pays 40BC to crooks, the crooks will of course launder the money immediately, probably several times over. As soon as the keys are recovered and there is no more danger of the crooks "getting revenge," the police issue a notice that all BC whose "transaction history" included this transaction are "tainted by the dirty transaction."
At this point, reputable companies who trust that particular police authority will only accept "tainted money" based on the "clean" portion of its value. Those who happen to be stuck with the "dirty money" are pretty much out of luck, in much the same way that I am out of luck if a store clerk accepts a very good counterfeit $5 bill from a crook then later innocently hands it to me in change later that day.
Yes, this setup has many flaws, but it's better than the status quo. Some obvious flaws include:
* it's currently not feasible
* there are many police authorities, and people trust them to different degrees, so the BC in your wallet may have a different value depending on who you want to do business with.
* Whoever has coins "descended" from tainted coins at the time they are announced as tainted will be stuck with the loss
* There is no built-in appeal for a police authority declaring a particular transaction "illegal" and declaring the coins received in that transaction "tainted". The only deterrent is that if a given police authority gets too sloppy or too abusive, fewer and fewer people will honor its declarations.
* There are no doubt other flaws, this is just the ones that came to mind immediately.
Of course, the real solution to ransomware is backups, backups, backups, but we all know that's not going to happen any time soon. Sigh.
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The basic problem with tracing bitcoin is that you get to make up your own version of the "government issued ID number" that most banks require, combined with the fact that - even though there are far fewer BTC exchanges than places to trade cash or cash equivalents, they are located in virtually every jurisdiction and non-extradition zone on the planet and inherently accessible within a fraction of a second from anywhere else on the planet.
As you imply above, any legal crackdown on how BTC operates will re
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And so it begins (Score:2)
weird (Score:2)
Is it just me or has Slashdot been recovering news in a timely fashion lately?
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Err I meant 'covering'... I guess even subconsciously I associate Slashdot with dupes.
this should be illegal (Score:2)
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how is this different from all states that pay everytime a national with some connections is kidnapped in crappystan, do you really think everytime an american is kidnapped they send steven seagull to rescue that person?
the dont negotiate with terrorists is just a movie sentence
It goes beyond movies to most media outlets - it's the repeated mantra, even though it's not 100% followed.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: (Score:2)
If you need your PHB to approve the funds for a project like this, point him to this article, and to: Harvard Business Review, Oct 2009, page 38.
Then tell him that almost 7 years later, the CIO/CISO from the hollywood hospital did not learn the lesson, and got eggfaced, would you, my dear PHB would like the same? no? Then approve project and funds!!!!
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Link for the lazy: https://hbr.org/2009/10/when-h... [hbr.org]
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I hope the FBI does their job (Score:2)
I hope they find these scum, take everything they own (it was involved in a felony), and gets each of them 20 years with no parole.
They're almost on par with the scum who cracked Goodwill, and stole customers' card info....
mark
A shot across the bow? (Score:2)
My gut tells me this is likely a white hat thing.