Writing a law that prevents this sort of pass-through is trivial. Hold all parties responsible. Don't even require first-hand knowledge that a ransom was paid.

Writing a law with proper disincentives is also trivial -- forget about fines. Proper jail time for senior execs and board members.

Execs and boards will be damn sure not to pay ransoms, and additionally damn sure that any company they hire to help knows in no uncertain terms that they are also not to pay any ransoms.

It really isn't that hard to write laws that disincentivize paying ransoms and aren't possible to route around with wink-and-nod bullshit.

Laws that disincentive paying ransoms don’t seem to necessarily be that simple to implement and uphold, at least as long as cryptocurrencies are in the equation.

Someone may have paid into that wallet, but who? Was it the attackers themselves, to make it seem to observers as if they succeeded? Did some consultant happen to keep a stash of crypto? Maybe the boss of the hacked organization wisely maintained a wallet for that purpose, funded by embezzling?

This is a great example of technologists underestimating the law. Juries, judges, and legislators are not complete dumbasses.

Presumably someone had to buy the cryptocurrency in the first place so that should be traceable.

One might not need to buy cryptocurrency all at once after the hack nor do it with visible corporate money, CEO can own a crypto wallet not connected to them in any way, there are mixers/anonymizers, etc. The range of possibilities is much broader in that land.

I wonder where this pop-understanding of the law that seems prevalent on HN comes from.

Loopholes exist, but in general the government is not terrible at figuring out basic schemes like this and adapt administration of the law.

I think a lot of the HN crowd think of laws like computer code- that it needs to be very exact. Most laws are fairly generalized with broad coverage, and the cases where they're not tend to be the exception, not the rule.

The law is like 100,000 lines of pseudo-code written by a humanities major who never took a CS class.

Libertarians have substantial, though I think not majority, representation on HN. Certain themes always seem to repeat that seem related to this. For instance, likening any form of prohibition to the failed prohibition of alcohol to suggest that all forms of prohibition are similarly doomed. This argument relies on the reader neglecting to consider the myriad of prohibitions that are going well, like CFC bans or the prohibition on building unsafe firetrap buildings. They point out one failure and ask us to extrapolate from only that datapoint, ignoring the rest.

As in this case, pointing out a hypothetical way a law could fail, to insinuate that all laws would fail.

It comes from watching Law & Order, and from decades of (elected) prosecutors painting important constitutional protections as trivial loopholes.

It's illegal to fund terrorism, I don't think paying someone to fund terrorism is a defence in a court of law.