So, person is either just dumb or playing 8 dimensional chess. I know what I think.

I normally come to the same conclusion when I'm thinking about politics.

This isn't 8-dimensions.

For someone who works in this space this would be a simple framing attempt. I give that like one dimension, maybe one and a half. In reality it's probably just a dumb crook or someone doing it for the lulz.

Someone has a bot that scrapes Github for Discord bot tokens and deletes all content in servers it has permissions in and replaces it with info saying X person did it and to "come to his house."

Stuff like that is pretty common I feel for people to use against their enemies. Especially if it was designed to be small and got out of hand.

Or maybe they know it'll look too dumb and thus suspect a framing attempt, so it's 3D class after all.

It could just be a person with some computer knowledge but not really smart enough to do an encrypted attack and if fake ID is as easy as some posters suggest, and they could very quickly and easily with the limited knowledge they had come out with a few thousand dollars then I don't think they were dumb or stupid. It may look stupid given how complex attacks can be these days but so too does the Nigerian Prince email look stupid. But he to this day is still looking for someone to help him with his money.

Also it's entirely possible they purposefully left the files recoverable via XOR instead of DES [1] because all they really care about is getting $16 from you, not punishing you if you don't.

[1] a distinction the author was clearly aware of as it claimed DES was used in the ransom note

I was wondering the same. It’s a pretty genius way to “get revenge” that’s likely to work if so.

You're probably right... but I wouldn't underestimate the power and prevalence of 差不多.

Translation?

I'm guessing "close enough" as in "sloppy work"?

Chabuduo - "near enough is good enough". Said when defending a half-assed solution that barely hangs together. Now that I think about it, I see this in codebases all the time.

MVP?

pretty much

here's more context: https://aeon.co/essays/what-chinese-corner-cutting-reveals-a...

more likely some kid who hacked together some ransomware.