It's always seemed like the best way to end ransomware is to launch hundreds of variants that demand money but don't actually decrypt anything. Unethical, to be sure, but eventually people would learn not to give them money.

All the competent ransomware authors are probably quite unhappy whenever a defective ransomware strain pops up.

If it gets big enough then people just hear from each other if paying unlocks the data or not.

The best way to end ransomware is to get serious about security. In many cases, being attacked by a ransomware, is paying a low price compared to if it was a targeted attack.

edit: Also, I imagine it gets easier after you wrote one i.e. many ransomewares come from the same author. So he could gain a reputation by signing messages saying that yes, this is our ransomware, we always unlock after receiving the payment.

>If it gets big enough then people just hear from each other if paying unlocks the data or not.

The idea would be to create "fake" ransomware that looks exactly like the real one

>The best way to end ransomware is to get serious about security

No matter how serious you get there always gonna be bugs, there isn't a single piece of mass distributed software in human history without bugs. That said, we should try to improve security of software but expecting it to be THE solution is wrong.

>Also, I imagine it gets easier after you wrote one i.e. many ransomewares come from the same author. So he could gain a reputation by signing messages saying that yes, this is our ransomware, we always unlock after receiving the payment.

Forging a signature is not that hard.

If forging digital signature is not that hard, then you can release some great scientific paper moving crypto decades ahead, or alternatively you can make billions.

I was talking about pixel-made signatures; you know, the one the user actually sees when the computer its already infected; not cryptography between public/private keys; otherwise its a chicken and egg problem; how do you know what signature its the "real"; you google it and hope nobody added its own search results? Go to the official website of the ransomware developer?

The ransomware can present the key fingerprint for example.

But even without it, there are so many options, e.g. timestamp signed message on the blockchain before the release. After just one confirmed message you don't care about pretenders because people can check if the signature matches with the previous message.

I think you are overestimating the technical capacities of the average randomware victim.

It's enough that some technical people verify it. The average random victim gets his info from news sites and more technical friends.

Is it not cryptographically possible to create a transparent provably-operational decryptor on top of something like ethereum?

It's a marketing issue. People likely to get hit with ransomware are incredibly unlikely to understand what that means. Hell, even main devs have trouble writing contracts, so even if a user knew there was a smart contract, verifying it would be another thing. So it'd get reduced to "guys on Twitter said this one works".

I like the idea though.

Since you can't store the private key needed to decrypt the files in ethereum, I can't think of how to do this.

All blockchain state is public, since it needs to be calculated by and verified by all nodes, so there's nowhere to stash a private key without revealing it.

It's a lot more likely that the attackers make money via the markets than via a direct ransom.

It's like saying best way to fight heroin addicts is to supply market with poisoned heroin. No heroin users - no problems!

The US government did this with alcohol during prohibition,

> by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...

A non-strawman analogy would be to sell fake heroin that looks exactly like heroin but does nothing at all. This analogy is more exact because the resource you are wasting its the same: money (not lives as in yours)

except that getting malware isn't addictive...

Your information is tho

Interesting. If I was Posteo I don't think I would've been so quick to ban the email, this will potentially cause a lot of harm. What about all the people that need their data back? They have no way to get it now. Plus many people are still going to post the money only to get no response from the email.

This is indeed a heavily debated topic.

It will cause a major headache for those who pay and will hopefully make people learn to distrust ransomware, in turn making it less lucrative.

On the other hand, that requires a fair number of "acceptable casualties" so to speak.

I personally think both sides of this are valid and don't know what the best option really is. It will be interesting to watch how things evolve at least.

>will hopefully make people learn to distrust ransomware, in turn making it less lucrative.

Ransomware will never ever not be lucrative. Preventing people from getting their data back doesn't discourage future campaigns and primarily hurts the victims of the ransomware.

[citation needed]

Seriously? The whole idea is so fundamentally stupid.

1) Ransomware authors have obvious economic incentive to decrypt, and no reason not to. This makes it a herculean task to convince the general public that they wouldn't do so.

2) By the time your data is encrypted, you'll be researching your specific ransomware strain and will find out if it's legit or not. Googling the onion address is an obvious choice and something the ransomware author can just tell you to do.

3) Most people will need someone more technical to arrange the bitcoin payment anyway, these people will verify if the ransomware seems to be legit or not.

4) People don't magically get smarter, phishing still works if you pass the spam filters.

5) Winlockers were immensely lucrative even before they started using crypto.

6) Unless you're going to run your fake-ransomware campaign at an immense scale you'll never drown out the real, working ransomware.

And then in the end, what the was your goal anyway? Good job, now you've deleted millions of peoples data on a retarded mission to "stop ransomware". But hey, at least you stopped those evil russians!!!

There are precisely zero good arguments for preventing people from decrypting their data.

> 1) Ransomware authors have obvious economic incentive to decrypt, and no reason not to. This makes it a herculean task to convince the general public that they wouldn't do so.

Its irrelevant, this has nothing to do with the fake ransomwares.

>2) By the time your data is encrypted, you'll be researching your specific ransomware strain and will find out if it's legit or not. Googling the onion address is an obvious choice and something the ransomware author can just tell you to do.

The search results of any onion address are just as fake-able.

> 3) 3) Most people will need someone more technical to arrange the bitcoin payment anyway, these people will verify if the ransomware seems to be legit or not.

Sure, with their ransomware-detecting powers

>4) People don't magically get smarter, phishing still works if you pass the spam filters.

What has to do with anything

I got bored to keep answering, in general your points seem week which make you sound a bit too much like a ransomware creator. Probably not because you have 3 years here but otherwise you do.

>I got bored to keep answering, in general your points seem week which make you sound a bit too much like a ransomware creator. Probably not because you have 3 years here but otherwise you do. 

Not a ransomware creator but I understand the economics at play. Ransomware is more profitable than sending spam, unless you're spamming to spread malware.

The value of individual installs has historically averaged at significantly less than a dollar each, ransomware is bringing that way up.

You aren't going to stop ransomware unless you figure out a solution to all other malware, or invent a more profitable scheme. People need to do something with their bots and ransomware is always going to make more money than spamming from bots that haven't been able to inbox anything for 5 years.

There's simply no way you'll stop enough people from paying to make viagra spam beat ransomware.

Not really, ransomware is way more dangerous than selling viagra; I may want to kill you if you encrypt my data, not so much if you sell me a couple of viagra pills that don't work. When you scam someone (e.g nigerian scam) you take money from one (or a few) person only, here you are taking data from a lot of people and hoping some very few will pay; making a lot more enemies in the process, likely including state actors; which may make it a federal crime to pay such ransomwares.

Diminishing returns, running spam botnets is already so risky that making more enemies by graduating to ransomware probably doesn't make a perceptible difference. Do you go to prison for 25 years or 30?

Sure, you could probably deter ransomware by sending DEVGRU to murder the authors, but I doubt it's worth the political shitstorm that'd follow.

It's also a good way to catch the authors. They might accidentally log in without using tor. (It's happened surprisingly often.)

It doesn't seem that getting ransoms was the actual goal of this malware, it seems rather like plausible deniability.

This is a good description of some details https://medium.com/@thegrugq/pnyetya-yet-another-ransomware-... - it rather looks like a targeted attack to do chaos+damage to Ukraine.

It's surprising that the attackers ask victims to send an email. Why not ask victims to publicly post a picture of their screen to social networks with a certain hash tag (and a new account)? That would be less traceable and harder to shut down, I think.

Not that I want to give attackers any ideas... :-)

There's so many creative things you can do when you imagine yourself as one of these attackers.

- Make a big target amount of money that any large company can pay, eg $10M, and tell people you'll release everyone's key if the amount is raised.

- Use an online board like this one to control the state of your network.

- Embarrass individual firms by posting pics of their offices from their own webcams.

Etc, etc. I reckon talking about these sorts of things will help find solutions rather than just inspire the bad guys.

> Make a big target amount of money that any large company can pay, eg $10M

That sounds like a good way to get state level actors on your case.

Yes, as long as the payments are individually relatively small and anonymous, it's easy for people to misunderstand the amount they may actually be getting. Once you paint a target in the millions, people will notice more, it will become a bigger news story, some congressman or another will make it a pet cause, and then you've got a lot or attention on you. Like any criminal enterprise, the less attention from authorities the better.

Thanks, we'll give it a go next time.

I've seen variants that use Bitmessage and other anonymous messengers before.

English version: https://posteo.de/en/blog/info-on-the-petrwrappetya-ransomwa...

It's not easy (I presume) to create such software. So why do they rely on some random e-mail provider? They could have done it so that computers unlock automatically after the address receives the payment. It's not that hard, the software could use multiple ways to get the private key (DNS, IRC, twitter, DHT) and it would be really hard to shut down.

Petya is ransomware-as-a-service, the author gives you the binary payload and unlocking service and it's up to the buyer to distribute / infect people. It often leads to poorly setup things like this where the buyer probably didn't expect their variant to spread so wildly.

They should sue the pants off whoever shut down that email address. For many companies it would have been cheaper to pay than to suffer the damage that has already been done. And it would be easier to catch the culprits if people give them lots of cash because in spending the loot, they will make mistakes and make themselves visible to the police.

Now there is nothing to track until they rewrite their code and try the attack again with randomized email addrs