
Nail, meet hammer!
I guess it is true... when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
The London law firm which secured a court injunction forbidding ransomware criminals from publishing data stolen from them has now gone a step further – by securing a default judgment from the High Court. 4 New Square Ltd, a barristers' chambers, raised some amusement in cyber security circles in July when it applied for a …
How clueless do you have to be to think that the goverment of the country you live in gives two shits about you if you're not super rich?
Inventing external enemies is a great way of turning focus away from terrible domestic policy. Notice that we're not discussing taxing the poor so the rich can keep their inheritances.
Maybe they should look at their own information security procedures with as much energy as they put into this court action?
I purchased a used Dell PC off of Ebay a while back. In the DVD drive was a disc with 4+ gigabytes of some law firm's case files going back several years! Morons!
I of course destroyed the disc. I thought about contacting the firm, and offering to mail the disc back to them, but then remembered these are lawyers we are talking about.
So, if this law firm were about to be flooded or burned down, would they deal with the problem by getting a court order against the water or fire?
On the other hand it is interesting legally if it sets a precedent that "papers" can be served by email.
In other news, apparently handing them to PC Plod guarding the respondent's home is not good enough.
...getting a court order against the water or fire?
Sounds reasonable if you can couple it with an earthly organisation. Wasn't there a (fictional) case about taking the church to court when a catastrophe was classified as "an act of God" and the church, as worldly representatives of God, should therefore be held accountable?
The only real solution is make the penalty worldwide for ransomware rather blood thirsty. There should be 'no cruel and unusual punishment' for these scum as even attacking someone not explicitly infrastructure or medical could have spill over effects on those organizations possibly resulting in death.
Anyone found with or attempting to sell the data already has a court injunction against them making holding the data the same as stealing it, which is also in line with UK law. Somebody buys this data and they too will have to prove that they are not the people the injuction applies to by giving up the seller.
For me this suggests that what was taken has implications to someone they represent within the UK and anyone now holding this data is deemed to have an injunction against Thus any media outlet that obtained the data would again have to prove who they got it from even if it was posted in anonymously or risk having to prove they didn't hack in themselves.
Interesting, effective this ruling means that possession of the data means you are now automatically guilty of stealing it, also in line with current UK laws
That may be the case but....all that will happen is the hackers will post the data publicly as a result of the court action which shows that this company does not intend to pay.
We can argue that might have happened without the court case anyway so this company is one up but what are they going to achieve by punishing one person they may catch with the data further down the line of the hundreds, if not thousands who will have their hands on it.
There used to be something called a Mareva order to freeze assets anywhere in the world that does accept UK high court judgements. So with a judgement under their belt the solicitors may be able to trace the hacker's money to an offshore location and seize it - or even attempt to seize an entire global blockchain of crypto currency if the hackers use that (probably). It would be fun to watch them try especially with a de-centralised project - 'all your mining and validator nodes belong to us now, that's 2 trillion usd' and you have to stop them all from transacting and rewind everything to yesterday morning when the order was signed. Not mathematically possible.
Never forget, Al Capone was done for tax avoidance, not for being a gangster. The injunction may seem pointless - but incremental actions that make life harder for crooks have value. Apart from anything else it can open doors to legal remedies, civil action etc., where the authorities are powerless to act.