Feds suspect ransom negotiator ran ShinyHunters extortion site
krebsonsecurity.com113 points by Bender 4 hours ago
113 points by Bender 4 hours ago
> In late September, ShinyHunters hacked the FBI recruitment website fbijobs.gov
The OPM breach was 11 years ago and apparently the incompetence still reigns.
The quality of offensive tooling has somewhat improved during that period.
In one of Sean Carroll's AMA's, he once said something along the lines of "entropy favors the attacker over the defender."
That really stuck with me. My internal thought was "it's easier to kick over a sand castle than to build one." It seems to ring true for infosec, societal structures, and kinetic cases. Is this just a base truth?
Yes, I've worded this as 'the asymmetry between creation and destruction'. Any idiot can destroy a piece of glass, it takes a whole raft of experts to make a pane and then some more to properly mount it.
Per the IRA after an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Thatcher, "Today we were unlucky, but remember we have only to be lucky once, you will have to be lucky always."
So why have government employees and contractors been so lazy and incompetent as to not improve defenses by a similar margin?
The vast majority of the competent people got DOGE’d. CISA lost like 40% of their staff including much of their red team specialty. 18F was completely eliminated (“Deleted” as Musk put it). If some specialist in the FBI who could have helped prevent the hack happened to have been assigned to work on the Classified Docs case, they were also fired because the most corrupt, incompetent group of morons is running things in DC for the next few years.
One of the most spectacular pieces of self-own for the current administration. Restructuring/deleting the directorate for biodefense during the previous administration (of the same color) would be up there.
I can see quite a few not-so-good reasons why they wanted to weaken the cybersecurity capability of the federal government.
It's not a self-own if they aren't the ones why have to deal with the consequences.
Do you think Donnie loses a second of sleep over this?
> 18F was completely eliminated
18F -> https://ndstudio.gov
As seen credited on recent publications like real realfood.gov.
+1, in this case, the hackers exploited a CVE in PeopleSoft that had a published patch. The contractors just didn't apply the patch. https://www.reuters.com/technology/accenture-contractor-remo...
If they're incompetent and lazy as you say then probably because they couldn't...
Even before the current administration, federal law enforcement's leaks of suspects, especially in high-profile crimes, have been highly unreliable and have ruined lives. See Wen Ho Lee, Richard Jewell, etc.
Breaking Bad vibes here. "You don't want a ransom negociator, you want a ransom negociator!"
Better than some random negotiator.
You can have $1,000,000 in unmarked bills as requested. Or you can have whatever is in the mystery box!
Working in the IR space I’ve had a lot of opportunities to work with negotiators before. Most of them are extremely professional and worth their weight in gold for what they provide to their clients.
Ridiculous that scumbags like this are tarnishing that space.
Can you shed a light on what this process looks like? Are negotiations are alike or completely unique? What does it boil down to..?
Thanks!
The book "Never split the difference" is a great read on hostage negotiations.
I do (half) remember reading that book! I actually meant to ask (in my question above) whether that book is actually "accurate"/representative of malware negotiations.
No honestly, most of the time it’s very formulaic. You can usually tell how it’s going to go once you know who has your data.
For instance, what’s mentioned in the article about not dealing with COM actors is great advice because chances are they’re going to keep your data and sell it or use it for future extortions no matter whether you pay.
Other actors though have a reputation to uphold to get paid and they know it.
An example of the process is something like:
1. Notification by ransom operators Including proof. Negotiations start at some arbitrary number like 6 percent of reported earnings.
2. Negotiators notified.
3. Back and forth begins. “This isn’t really that much data, do you have more? It’s not that damning. Fine, my client is willing to pay 50k. 60k? Okay, but you need to provide proof of how you got I the data so we can close the gap”.
based on history, expect more ridiculous scumbags in the future:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ransomware-re...
https://complexdiscovery.com/a-48-month-federal-benchmark-re...
Very cringe of you to automatically believe what the FBI tells you, especially when they're embarassed and trying to save face.
Nothing is yet proven and other articles have painted this arrest as shocking.
Ransom negotiators are all scumbags. Their actions perpetuate further criminality and place others at greater risk. Paying a ransom should always be a criminal offense, even if not paying means that people die and businesses are destroyed.
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Reading their comment strongly, as the guidelines suggest, it seems they want criminals to make $0 so they stop doing that. Is it not equally "cringe" to say society can't put up with some discomfort so assholes don't get free vacations and nice toys. It's a disguised trolley problem, and there's no agreed upon answer for that one either.
https://neal.fun/absurd-trolley-problems/
We all gotta do what we can to get through the day, but you can't live next to someone who has the same challenge but a different answer to some trolly problem? Is your future world just a bunch of closed communities where outsiders and ideas and their differ skin color and economic background aren't welcome?
Yes, I would absolutely rather have that. Preventing criminals from receiving additional money prevents them from having the resources to attack others in the future. Unlike you, I actually care about my community and think deeply about the consequences.
Alternately they may not believe starving out the criminals will actually work and so foresee different consequences. Like when Google penalized SEO, and so spammers used their networks for extortion instead of spam. Similarly if we killed ransomware, the machinery built to conduct these attacks would not just lie fallow. It's capital that will continue to be leveraged to generate returns. We may not like the next business model they come up with.
It's not a contest, we all can care and think deeply and still come to different conclusions.
It sounds like you don’t understand the problem very well. Forgive me if that’s an incorrect interpretation.
One way to prevent this type of crime is to ensure that it is never profitable. The downside is that there will be losses until the message is thoroughly communicated.
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Did everyone in this comment section just miss the fact that the contents of the article are primarily Krebs’ research? The feds haven’t actually said anything publicly. Krebs cites someone close to the investigation, but that’s it.
They've confirmed the part that this article is specific on[0]. The part that's vague.. is, I guess, to be announced soon?
[0]: FBI arrests Canadian cybersecurity expert in ShinyHunters hacking case (6 points, 8 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50066759
Yeah we just need to vote in the other half of the uniparty, right guys? Let's vote even harder next time! I'm gonna voooooote hnnngh
As much as this is a bit of a shit post I dont think it is wrong. Both sides behind the scenes are in pretty strong lockstep.
Thered need to be changes in how lobbying and certain countries are registered to make a dent. Everyone says age but I dont think that matters as much as the lobbying industry. Young people are every bit as corruptible as the old.
Nobody should trust the feds ever. It's mostly through privilege and circumstance that they help anything ever.
Yeah it feels like this guy is probably innocent and refused to be an informant of some kind. He probably was approached to help entrap them, stayed out of it and now the FBI is ruining his life for it.
I wouldnt really trust them under any admin, but yeah this current regime is definately will to play fast and loose with people's lives to make themselves seem competent.
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