back to article After injecting cancer hospital with ransomware, crims threaten to swat patients

Extortionists are now threatening to swat hospital patients — calling in bomb threats or other bogus reports to the police so heavily armed cops show up at victims' homes — if the medical centers don't pay the crooks' ransom demands. After intruders broke into Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center's IT network in November …

  1. xyz123 Silver badge

    These ransomware people shoul;d be tried, and painfully tortured to death live on pay-per-view.

    For lesser malware, give them 1 day in prison for every PC they infect. Oh you're in prison for 2,456,405? oh well we won't be needing THIS <throws cell key in the furnace>

    1. heyrick Silver badge
      Pint

      I vehemently disagree.

      Broadcast it on PBS, not pay-per-view. Everybody should be able to watch these bastards suffer (and anyway asking for payment just feels really icky).

      Otherwise, upvoted and see icon.

    2. Someone Else Silver badge

      Can I assume that the downvoters are perhaps engaged in the very extortion mentioned in the article?

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Yes, the only reason anyone would object to torture is because they support the potential victims. For our foes, it's just fine.

        Or maybe you and the OP and all the upvoters should get a fucking grip and try to behave like civilized people?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          and you would what? give the criminals torturing people that are already dealing with cancer, a hug? The ransomware gang chose to be evil, they should endure all the suffering they give others, not hugged.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Spend a little time in the real world. Read a little history. Find out whether your simplistic approach has ever achieved anything when tried previously.

            Are there less murders in places with the death penalty?

            Is there less stealing when thiefs are dismembered?

            These extortionists are behaving like absolute cunts. The answer isn't to try and out-cunt them.

  2. heyrick Silver badge

    Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

    ...in order that, if a swatting should be attempted (given that it has already been threatened), the police can visit the premises in a slightly less gung ho method on the basis that it may very well be a fake report?

    1. Grogan Silver badge

      Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

      LOL... you mean they could behave the way they are supposed to if they were informed ahead of time?

      The only reason swatting IS so dangerous is because of the way the police behave in the Excited States of America.

      Cops could come here right now, they'd be greeted at the door, they'd tell us, we'd say "What? There's no problem here" and then they would would come in and have a look. The only people inconvenienced would be the police.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

      Let's start by publishing the ransomware crooks full names and addresses.

      1. Version 1.0 Silver badge

        Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

        But is there any evidence of who the ransomware crooks are and where they are?

        If they are "calling in bomb threats or other bogus reports to the police so heavily armed cops show up at victims' homes — if the medical centers don't pay the crooks ransom demands" then it's probably a totally fake threat unless the ransomware crooks are in the US. That seems unlikely because while American criminals have guns, the police and virtually everyone in any neighborhood in America is even heavier armed.

      2. doublelayer Silver badge

        Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

        Fine with me. And those are? The problem with crime of this nature is that we usually don't know all the names and addresses, and when we find out one of them, it's usually more useful to hide it because there's a chance we may find more, while publishing the one we have will just alert them that we're getting close. Some criminals have been arrested successfully when law enforcement has succeeded in unmasking them, but unfortunately not often enough to stop others doing it.

      3. EricB123 Silver badge

        Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

        "Let's start by publishing the ransomware crooks full names and addresses."

        In North Korea? Warming my motorbike now!

    3. Phil O'Sophical Silver badge

      Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

      It should also be easier to track down the makers of hoax bomb/SWAT calls than finding ransomware hackers. The police are pretty good at doing that already, especially for the crooks who think just blocking caller ID will hide their phone number...

      1. druck Silver badge

        Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

        Isn't any level of suspicion noted for calls originating outside the geographic area of the alleged SWAT worthy situation? Particularly from outside the US where the vast majority of ransomware criminals are located.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

          Seriously? That would mean the cops wouldn't be able to suit up and go bash some doors down.

          American cops are former high school bullies. They get their jollies murdering people, that's actually part of their training. Think I'm exaggerating? Read this: “Are You Prepared to Kill Somebody?” A Day With One of America’s Most Popular Police Trainers

          Throw in that spoofing locations isn't hard, and you've got dead people.

          Swatting works because of how American cops behave and who they are.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

            No, its because they refuse to hire based on intelligence.

        2. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

          It should be, and for all I know they may have some method of determining that which for some reason isn't used for many calls. However, criminals who have even a bit of a clue could find ways to relay calls from their location to somewhere local, or even pay someone to make the calls on their behalf. There was a group of adolescents interviewed on a security podcast who operated swatting as a service operations, so they could try outsourcing the work to those guys. It probably won't end well for the less intelligent of those ones, but it offers them another proxy.

          For those who are interested in hearing it, the specific episode is Episode 83: 'DING-DONG DITCH' ON STEROIDS (link goes to Apple podcasts).

        3. Erik Beall

          Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

          After 9/11, law enforcement was explicitly told that in order to combat terrorism which could happen anywhere, they needed to be able to control every interaction with a civilian, just in case. The unintentional consequences were a mirror of those of the Patriot act, which meant warrantless and warrant-light surveillance on the one hand, and massively increased aggression in traffic and random stop and searches, with an explicit okay. Police were objectively scarier to interact with by 2010 versus 2000, many Americans can tell you. And by 2015 more states had concealed carry so now cops really do have good reason to assume their encounters with civilians have much a greater than negligible chance of involving a weapon. There's no going back, but on the plus side for our politicians on both sides, they both get to claim they and only they can make us safer by (not addressing root causes) doing "something" (something that fits with one or the other narrative). More people have guns, police are trained to dominate interactions, and more adults act like entitled toddlers in every walk of life, and bullied kids think the answer is to emulate the entitled adults who get their way by force. I like the high school training they're doing in Finland and other states to recognize gaslighting on the Internet but that's a drop in the bucket and really I do not see this getting much better in my lifetime.

          1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

            Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

            I don't think those consequences were unintended.

            Of course the situation is always more complex than any synopsis can convey. I have friends and relatives in the police, and I've known other good police officers who are deeply concerned with avoiding unnecessary violence and injury, applying the law fairly, and so forth. The post-2001 militarization of police forces is indeed a big problem. So is the ever-broadening mandate of police forces to deal with all the social problems that states and the public have given up on: domestic strife, child welfare (aggravated by popular dangerism), homelessness (often coupled with mental illness), alcohol and drug abuse, and various other ills. The war on social services that began during Nixon's presidency and has continued since has severely overburdened many police forces, and put officers in situations they're not adequately trained for, nor given resources to address properly.

            Then we have the problem of similarly under-trained officers being asked to respond en masse to (supposed) hostage situations and the like, as in the Finch case, where they're inadequately informed and under-supervised.

            And we have various Federal agencies trying to use local law enforcement as proxies (e.g. the TSA) or in conjunction with their own forces (e.g. the DEA, ATF, ICE, etc).

            Meanwhile, abuse of qualified immunity, endorsed and encouraged by SCOTUS (particularly Antonin "Drop a Tree" Scalia, of blessed memory, and Clarence "Nothing's Cruel" Thomas), has emboldened those who'd like to see more police thuggery. And politicians know that on the balance "tough on crime" often gets them votes, particularly since a majority of Americans are convinced that violent crime is getting worse even though the opposite has been true for decades.

        4. Grogan Silver badge

          Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

          It takes time to get a real trace on a spoofed VOIP exchange. The phone company can do it, they'd know it was foreign pretty quickly, but not quickly enough for police to respond. Somebody would have to query databases etc. (and to actually find the origin it would take cooperation on the other end too)

        5. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

          Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

          Isn't any level of suspicion noted for calls originating outside the geographic area of the alleged SWAT worthy situation?

          Yes, but that's not a reliable indicator. Barriss used VoIP (via a public library's guest WiFi) to call Wichita City Hall, where he convinced the person who answered the call to transfer him to Wichita PD. For the police in that case, the call was local, because it was routed through City Hall.

          Now, they should have noted the call was not coming from the claimed address; and the person who transferred the call should have flagged that it was being transferred. There were a lot of mistakes made in the Finch case from the moment it started — and no one paid for any of them. (The officer who shot Finch was promoted to detective, for example. None of his superiors were disciplined for their mishandling of the situation either.) But it wasn't quite as simple as the police falling for an out-of-state caller.

      2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

        The police are pretty good at doing that already

        Citation needed. What fraction of police responses are triggered by swatting? In what fraction of those have police identified the culprit? Show your work.

    4. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Would it not be possible to give a patient list to the police...

      if a swatting should be attempted (given that it has already been threatened), the police can visit the premises in a slightly less gung ho method

      Yeah, good luck with that.

      In smaller communities — towns and smaller cities — you're probably going to get a more careful and proportionate response regardless. In larger ones, there's a good chance the police force will go all Wichita without bothering to check any "list" that was provided to them. In the Wichita Finch case, the swatting call didn't even come through emergency response — Barriss called Wichita City Hall and asked to be transferred to Wichita PD. If that didn't give them pause, do you think they'd stop to look at a list provided by some random medical firm?

      And, of course, since there are no consequences for the police, either for supervisors or for officers who actually pull the trigger, in these incidents, they have no institutional motivation to try to correct the problem. Certainly there are many good police officers who are sincerely troubled by it, but there's no structural pressure.

  3. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

    A far better

    option would be fining the manufacturers of the software that gets hacked to leak the information.

    Eg criminals do the social engineering to get in the front door with 'try this app to clear the error' or some such BS , followed by the malware walking through holes in the software, with the result that the information is stolen.

    Maybe forcing software creators to ensure their products are secure before they are deployed would stop 75% of the ransomware issue.

    <painfully remembers the day he got a virus... javascript malware running on internet exploiter , linked itself to a system process then allowed to run riot.... thanks a lot mickey mouse soft

    And yes I'm aware of the social engineering attacks that that would not stop (apart for educating users to challenge random callers) and forcing phone companies to use actual caller IDs instead of having the systems where a caller ID can be spoofed (see a BBC news story about that last week).

    Only then you'll be able to go after the criminals , but seeing as they are from a different country from where the offence takes place , that could be very hard, especially if the country does not care what its citizens get upto on the internet so long as they dont attack victims in their home country.

    1. elsergiovolador Silver badge

      Re: A far better

      Writing secure software needs talented and expensive workers. This means smaller profit and starving shareholders.

      Thankfully, consultancies usually delivering this type of software have great contact (wink wink) with policymakers, so that we can rest assured no shareholder will go to sleep with an empty belly.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: A far better

        That's why either liability or regulation is needed. Those are the ways we turn externalities into direct costs, and make them apply equally (well, in an ideal world) to all vendors so as to remove the market incentive to violate them.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A far better

      More specifically the CEO. After all, we are repeatedly assured that their grossly disgusting levels of compensation are because they are "responsible".

      1. ravenviz Silver badge

        Re: A far better

        Passing legislation for paid ransoms to be directly deducted from CEO and Executive Team bonuses could have a preferred outcome.

    3. John Tserkezis

      Re: A far better

      option would be fining the manufacturers of the software that gets hacked to leak the information.

      This won't work for people who recycle passwords.

      Unless you mean fining them too? That would be acceptable...

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: A far better

        There are alternatives to using passwords for authentication. While there are problems with all of them, there are problems with passwords, too.

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A far better

      That would not be good for M$

      If these software houses were producing buildings, they would be knocked down and condemned by the authorities

    5. BobTheIntern

      Re: A far better

      While there are plenty of examples of poor cybersecurity practices in software development, there is little to nothing programmers can do to defend against an as-of-yet-unknown zero-day exploit or other mechanism of obtaining elevated system access.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: A far better

        True. But security is a matter of economics. Improving defenses and removing the vulnerabilities you can identify raises costs for attackers, and that in turn reduces successful attacks.

        Improving software security is justifiable even if it can't achieve perfection.

    6. hoola Silver badge

      Re: A far better

      Except that human error is also a large means of entry.

      Just dealing software vendors is only part of the solution.

      I have another more radical ideas:

      Stop putting so much stuff online because convenience and using a f***ing App is more important that security.

      Stop running stuff in other people's clouds because it is "cheaper"

      And finally stop collecting so much data about people, bother directly & indirectly and then storing it to be used as an asset to make money.

    7. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: A far better

      The most secure software in the world, the hardest laws in the world, the strictest religions in the world - will never prevent a bad person from doing evil things.

      My grandparents used to leave their house unlocked all the time, I told them what if someone broke in, they said nobody would do that. They responded, what if one of our neighbors down the road walked up and needed to use the bathroom when they weren't home,,, just blew my mind. These days people would get blamed for having 'to easy of a lock to pick" for being robbed. The lock doesn't matter, it's the criminal that needs fixed.

  4. Ian Johnston Silver badge

    The baddies are bad, of course, but perhaps it would help everyone if the US police didn't so often take a "Kill them all and let God sort them out" approach to anonymous phone calls. Just a thought.

    1. VicMortimer Silver badge

      Yep.

      This only works as a threat because of how bad American cops are.

  5. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Lucky us

    Thank cod, our medical records will be stored in one place under competent and hawkish eye of Palantir, so such thing will never happen!

    Also thank cod our police would have never showed up anyway (unless you call in that you smelled weed of course).

  6. Michael Hoffmann Silver badge

    Escalation?

    Is it too much to hope that this pretty brutal escalation is a sign of decreasing income streams with the "traditional" ransomware approach?

    Or worse, one-upmanship and competition between too many actors where only the most vicious ones make money? In that case, we can hope that sooner or later they start attacking each other.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Escalation?

      No, its because some overpaid, worthless, dipshit at the FBI made a stupid statement about a criminal gang's server that they took over. But it turns out that he was wrong.

    2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Escalation?

      Oh, they have been attacking each other. There's plenty of turbulence in the IT crime sector.

      The problem here is that there are at least two major sources of innovation in extortionate IT crimes (ransomware, etc). The private-sector gangs mostly operate on an affiliate model; since the gang leaders aren't performing the attacks themselves, they need to introduce innovation in order to justify their own existence and distinguish themselves from other gangs to their affiliates.

      Meanwhile, the government-sponsored and -allied groups are under more direct performance pressure from their task masters. If you were running a North Korean ransomware team, would you want to show Kim a graph that's not trending in the right direction?

      So some of the innovation may be due to supply constraints, probably as much because of competition as because of improving security posture by victims. But a lot of it is due to increasing demand.

  7. M.V. Lipvig Silver badge
    Mushroom

    Brutality

    should invite brutality. Make it known that the various militaries of the world will begin tracking down these ransomware attackers, and once a location is positively identified it will NOT be referred to law enforcement. Rather, the location will be referred to a nearby cooperative military who will then deal with the problem. Boom.

    Obviously it would not be a one nuke fits all solution, but if these cyber terrorist groups start disappearing in clouds of acrid smoke and their first sign of trouble is bang bang, they all fall down, then they'll be a lot less likely to continue. Let the military coalition announce in vague terms that they soon expect to reach a few more groups, and they'll all shut down at least for a while. And with a large coalition, rogue nations could not pin down any one nation as working inside their borders. They'll blame the US, of course, but wouldn't be able to do anything.

    1. Neil Barnes Silver badge

      Re: Brutality

      The snag with this kind of approach is the same as that with massive prison sentences. It's often satisfying when some miscreant is sentenced to one but its hard to say how well such sentences - even capital punishment - works as a deterrent. Clearly it's not 100% or you wouldn't have huge prisons full of sentenced prisoners. Obviously the prisoners (assuming guilt) either didn't know about the scale of sentence they could expect (unlikely), they felt the reward was worth the risk, or they (most likely, I think) thought they would never be caught.

      I agree entirely that these cyber attackers should disappear, but I'm not convinced that this approach is going to work for many of them. It's certainly not going to work for state actors; it's hard to see, for example, retribution actually happening in say North Korea or Russia.

      Speaking from a position of complete ignorance, I might suggest better compartmentalisation of access to the data, and most likely a damn sight less data being collected and retained in the first place? I know that's not going to work when the target is something like a hospital, but it might be a start...

      Neil

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Brutality

        but its hard to say how well such sentences - even capital punishment - works as a deterrent.

        Do you know why it doesn't work as a deterrent? Because inmates gets a place to sleep, 3 meals a day, access to medical care, TV & Internet and all that FOR FREE! Make them earn their keep (not Auschwitz style but close) and you'll see some deterrent.

        As for capital punisment, I'd say that's a permanent deterrent.

        1. Sandtitz Silver badge

          Re: Brutality

          "Do you know why it doesn't work as a deterrent? Because inmates gets a place to sleep, 3 meals a day, access to medical care, TV & Internet and all that FOR FREE! Make them earn their keep (not Auschwitz style but close) and you'll see some deterrent.

          "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons"

          A place to sleep? Perhaps some vagrants do petty crimes to exit winter conditions and for a more regular meal ticket. I believe that is a very small percentage of all prisoners, however.

          So, how much nutrition would AC be ready to give the inmates? Denying medical care - do you think most criminals are already paragons of health and would care? Denying TV - should the inmates also be denied of all news and entertainment as well? All those are recipe for mental issues and more violence. Any freed inmate will just cause more problems for the society when they come back with no skills, in poor health due to denied medical care and starvation, and probably bearing a grudge against everyone. Easiest course for them is to continue criminal life.

          People commit capital offenses because they don't pay any thought to a possible sentence; some believe they can get away with crimes; some have the "get rich or die tryin" mentality; some are ushered to crimes by the company they are with. Some people have mental issues (psychopaths, sociopaths) and can be violent without (apparent) provocation, or are totally indifferent to other people's suffering without consideration for their own punishment. People still kill people in states where death penalty is certain.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Brutality

            OK, so poor people in our society are denied a place to sleep, access to medical care, healthy meals, access to entertainment but we must provide all these to people breaking the law?

            Let's get back to the good old ways (eye for an eye and so on) and I bet the number of people breaking the law will go down. Quickly.

            1. Stork

              Re: Brutality

              I believe if you compare murder rates in medieval vs contemporary Europe, they used to be higher.

            2. Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch Silver badge

              Re: Brutality

              OK, so poor people in our society are denied a place to sleep, access to medical care, healthy meals, access to entertainment but we must provide all these to people breaking the law?

              We must provide all these, and, more than any of the things mentioned, we must provideeducation to people to prevent them breaking the law in the first place.

              Take a really close look at how potent a driver of crime socioeconomic inequality is. Tough-on-crime types sadly correlate highly with weak-on-the-causes-of-crime in reality. Maybe they recognise a vicious cycle they can exploit.

              These ransoms are clearly being demanded by sociopaths. Their crimes should be managed on a scale higher than run-of-the-mill property crimes. But since they're often state-sponsored, they're probably being given a flash car and a promotion.

              1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

                Re: Brutality

                But since they're often state-sponsored, they're probably being given a flash car and a promotion.

                Hell, in North Korea, "my family eats tonight!" is probably sufficient incentive.

        2. doublelayer Silver badge

          Re: Brutality

          The quality of the prison doesn't change the expectation of ending up there. People do things all the time where the severity of the bad outcome is high but the risk of incurring it is, or they perceive that risk to be, low. Ransomware operators already have received very long sentences, but that's a small subset of people, and some of the others are living with quite a bit of wealth and happily evading law enforcement. Criminals have chosen to believe that they'll be like the latter and avoid the situation of the former. So far, they're mostly right to think they'll avoid the arm of the law, although they're often wrong about how well they'll be paid for the work. Increasing the severity of what will happen if law enforcement gets them won't have much of an effect unless law enforcement starts getting to more of them, and I think that the effect would be similar without increasing the penalties at all if they could only be applied more broadly.

        3. Richard 12 Silver badge

          Re: Brutality

          None of that works as a deterrent, because the criminals do not believe they will ever get caught.

          Changing the threatened consequence has no effect whatsoever when the probability of it actually happening is effectively zero.

          For the vast majority, a single week in prison - or even a single night - is sufficient consequence to deter if it was very likely to happen.

        4. Filippo Silver badge

          Re: Brutality

          >Do you know why it doesn't work as a deterrent? Because inmates gets a place to sleep, 3 meals a day, access to medical care, TV & Internet and all that FOR FREE! Make them earn their keep (not Auschwitz style but close) and you'll see some deterrent.

          Why guess? Nearly every possible approach to criminal punishment has been actually done somewhere, often on a large scale. Have you tried looking at crime stats for countries with really bad prison conditions? Or with really good ones? Or even for the same country, as prison conditions evolve over time? Or, for big countries, from areas with different prison conditions? It's mostly public data, and there are plenty of websites that collate it. It's an extremely well-studied subject.

          Trigger warning: the data contradicts your thesis.

    2. Pete Sdev Bronze badge
      FAIL

      Re: Brutality

      You know, if you're having trouble getting it up, there's meditation these days that'll help. You don't need to resort to puerile violent fantasies.

      Also, as others have mentioned, it's this trigger-happy attitude that means swatting is only really a thing in the US.

      I'm also slightly depressed, if not particularly surprised, at some of the other comments here sadistic in nature showing infantile authoritarian personalities.

      The behaviour of these criminals in the article is abhorrent. However, I wish to live in a civilised society. I expect plod to try and apprehend those responsible and if successful a fair trial. If found guilty , an appropriate jail sentence free of "cruel and unusual punishment ".

      1. Boris the Cockroach Silver badge

        Re: Brutality

        Quote

        "an appropriate jail sentence free of "cruel and unusual punishment ".

        yeah 30 years in a Russian gulag should do the trick (unless they want to volunteer for a human wave attack against Ukrainian heavy machine guns.....)

    3. Grogan Silver badge

      Re: Brutality

      If they were afraid of being caught, they already wouldn't be doing it. It's not a simple matter like tracing a legit phone call. It would take cooperation in other countries to find the real origin of a spoofed VOIP exchange. You'd catch idiots if they were using a domestic telco and just supplying false callier id info, but people who know what they are doing will be routing their calls through a foreign VOIP exchange.

      It's kind of like saying, "If you rob banks, we're coming after you!" except there's far less risk of getting caught.

  8. J.G.Harston Silver badge

    Say FUCK YOU to the ransomers, and just delete everything and re-install.

    1. Alumoi Silver badge
      Joke

      From your backup. Ooops!

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      How do you reinstall someone's stolen personal information?

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        "Just reinstall from backup" is the way commentators on ransomware stories spell "I can't be arsed to pay attention".

  9. GoneFission

    Gotta love the boilerplate responses to these incidents. "Sorry we lost all your PII due to a combination of negligence and misfortune, here's some free credit monitoring from a random lowest-bidder vendor that will auto-renew and bill you after the 12 free months expire. They already have your credit card info from the past 25 leaks so don't worry about entering your payment details. Thaaaaanks"

  10. Kev99 Silver badge

    Once more the idiocy of putting confidential, business critical data out on the bunch of holes held together with string / vapor is proven.Are these entities so beholden to their bean counters that security means nothing?

    1. Someone Else Silver badge

      Are these entities so beholden to their bean counters that security means nothing?

      Yes. Next question?

      Well, that may not exactly be fair. The bean-counters themselves may actually give a toss about security. But they give a bigger toss about the cocaine-addled yuppie shareholders that hold their leashes. And those fucks only care about their next dividend payment, so....

    2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Sigh.

      Medical practitioners have to keep a lot of sensitive PII. They often have very tight IT budgets — in many cases, insufficient to hire dedicated IT staff. They buy off-the-shelf medical-records software because they really don't have any other choice, so they can get on with the business of providing medical care.

      Blaming them is not helping.

  11. trindflo Silver badge

    Eventual violence

    Violence was being threatened in extortion emails for a *very* short while (maybe two days). Similar to the "I turned on your webcam and caught you doing something nasty" threats, these were very simply "we know where you live, and ...". I assumed they stopped because that crossed a line. I also was hoping the feds would be interested and forwarded them to official channels. I can't imagine swatting being any less interesting to authorities.

    We had a horrible spam filtering company for a while and I ended up needing to scan a lot of emails by hand, so I saw most flavors of the garbage. Some of it was funny in a very sad way, assuming some people were responding to it.

  12. Mockup1974

    Where are all these ransomware gangs from and why can't we find the perpetrators? I'm genuinely curious. Like, is it random Indian/Pakistani scammers or North Korean government-sponsored hackers? Or both?

    1. doublelayer Silver badge

      It's a bunch of people from everywhere. One common setup involves Russia, because it and surrounding countries have had a lot of people who have technical skills but few job prospects, and Russia has turned a blind eye to criminals who don't attack Russians and occasionally help them disguise government actions. That's why some of the largest operations are based there. However, even those have a lot of outsourcing. For example, they might write the encryption software themselves and run the negotiations, but they let someone else break into the networks to install it. That person gets a cut and could easily be outside Russia. Similarly, even those who work for the group need not be in Russia, and very commonly are located elsewhere. Ukraine had a lot of participants, and while the Ukrainian authorities were much more helpful in arresting them when identified, it didn't stop it being a country with plenty of participants. A group can form in any country, can have employees or partners in any other set of countries, and can be created by multiple types of people, from those interested in a quick heist to governments trying to disguise military actions as a criminal enterprise.

  13. RobinYong

    Death sentence please

    Nothing less than death sentence for these scum is best punishment.

    Dolls jail them for at least 20 to 30 years without the good behaviour sentence reducing discount crap, street that only hang them.

    The deserve it.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Cancer is the ransomware gangs

    And they should all die from it, but only after suffering from it, then having someone harass them on their death bead, remind them that unlike other people - they earned it.

  15. hoola Silver badge

    There are many issues to finding these gangs. They can operate with impunity from countries that are difficult to get police cooperation from. The very nature of the activity means that no personal exposure is needed. Perhaps if Bitcoin and other Crypto-currencies were all blocked then it would help as the money trail is generally the way gangs are exposed.

    That is not going to happen as there are too many vested interests from people who believe crypto currencies are a good thing.

    It is far more difficult to find £5m in cash and then put it in a suitcase by a part bench for the baddies to pick up.

  16. JohnSheeran
    Trollface

    Sounds like terrorism.

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