Cyber scum pump ransomware at victims from spambot-stuffed websites Miscreants have brewed up a strain of ransomware which functions like the recently dead CryptoLocker - and this one communicates using the Tor browsing anonymization network. Critroni appears geared towards exploiting a gap in the market created by a takedown operation against the CryptoLocker and Gameover ZeuS botnets back in …
but these bandits extract money from their victims. That money will need to be extracted from a bank or similar somehow - why can the police not ''follow the money'' and collar whoever walks away with the foldy stuff ? I accept that it might be hard, but that they don't seem to do it at all suggest that the cops are not interested; each one might be small beer, but added up it is a lot of dosh, quite apart from the anguish caused and time wasted.
Also: Edward Snowden has told us how much the NSA/GCHQ snoop - why do they not put their efforts to some useful end -- I thought that they were charged with protecting us from harm. If this is not harm ... then what the hell is ?
Yeah, that's pretty naive.
They demand payment in bitcoin, not in some transfer that's easy to track. I'm not going to say it's completely anonymous to use bitcoins, but its certainly beyond a lot of police authorities. And they are not going to go to that effort to solve a petty scam either. It's not so much that the cops just don't care about people (although that is usually a good assumption); combined with jurisdictional issues, the technology demand makes it inefficient for them to try and resolve these cases.
And the snoopers at the Fed level won't help. It's not their problem, and they don't want to reveal their capacity to track darkweb activity anyway.
Agreed - the NSA/GCHQ could give themselves some positive PR for a change by not just taking down a bot network, but finding and getting the perpetrators arrested. Will all the info they collect, they must be able to partner with Microsoft and anti-virus companies to work all the way back to the control servers and trace the owners. If 80% of the internet is spam, it'll save them disk space if they take down a few spam-spewing botnets, and speed up the net for everyone.
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