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June 22, 2022
How to Negotiate with Ransomware Hackers
<p>Original Article: <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/06/07/how-to-negotiate-with-ransomware-hackers">How to Negotiate with Ransomware Hackers </a></p> <p>Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit <a href="https://sendtopod.com">SendToPod</a></p> <br> Follow me on <a href="https://twitter.com/tuancm">Twitter</a> to find out more.<br> ---- <hr> <p>Minder soon found more work. Sometimes it was a prominent company facing a multimillion-dollar ransom demand, and the negotiation took weeks. Sometimes it was a small business or a nonprofit that he took on pro bono and tried to wrap up over the weekend. But GroupSense rarely made money from the negotiations. Some ransomware negotiators charge a percentage of the amount that the ransom gets discounted. “But those really profitable approaches are ripe for fraud, or for accusations of fraud,” Minder said. Instead, he charged an hourly rate and hoped that some of the organizations that he helped would sign up for GroupSense’s core product, security-monitoring software.</p><p>Last March, after GroupSense’s office shut down, Minder paced in circles in his four-hundred-and-seventy-five-square-foot apartment. “I was, like, I need to go hike,” he said. He towed two motorcycles to a rental house in Grand Junction, Colorado. As the world fell apart, the ransomware cases kept coming. Minder handled the negotiations himself; he didn’t want to distract his employees, and he found that the work required a certain emotional finesse. “Most of our employees are really technical, and this isn’t a technical skill—it’s a soft skill,” he told me. “It’s hard to train people for it.”</p><p>The initial exchange of messages was crucial. People advocating on their own behalf had a tendency to berate the hackers, but that just riled them up. Minder aimed to convey a kind of warm condescension—“Like, we’re friends, but you don’t really know what you’re doing,” he explained. His girlfriend, who speaks Romanian, Russian, Ukrainian, and some Lithuanian, helped him find colloquialisms that would set the right tone. He liked to call the hackers kuznechik, Russian for “grasshopper.”</p><p>Occasionally, Minder was called in to try to rescue negotiations that had gone off the rails. If hackers felt that a negotiation was moving too slowly, or they sensed that they were being lied to, they might cut off communication. Following the advice of Chris Voss, a former F.B.I. hostage negotiator who is now a negotiation consultant, Minder tried to establish “tactical empathy” by mirroring the hacker’s language patterns.</p><p>Most of the time, Minder found himself dealing with a representative from one of the syndicates. “The first person you talk to is, like, level-one support,” he told me. “They’ll say something like ‘I want to work with you, but I have to get my manager’s approval to give that kind of discount.’ ”</p><p>GroupSense partnered with CipherTrace, a blockchain-analysis firm, which allowed Minder to see that a particular cryptowallet had been created and to trace its transactions. Determining the average payments flowing into a wallet gave him a sense of the going rate, so he could avoid overpaying. He came to understand that syndicates were working from a script. “Oftentimes, we can go to the client and say how it’s going to go before it starts,” he told me.</p><p>The clients themselves could be more challenging. Minder ran all communications by them, through a secure portal. Some wanted to edit every message to the hackers. “It’s like a spy game to them,” Minder said. Others erupted in anger or frustration. “Sometimes you’re negotiating in two directions at once—with the hacker and with the victim,” he said. “You have to have a personality type where you can be empathetic but also give directions in a way that isn’t confrontational.”</p><p>Minder has already seen pressure tactics and ransom demands escalate. In 2018, the average payment was about seven thousand dollars, according to t...</p>
June 21, 2022
The Lazarus heist: How North Korea almost pulled off a billion-dollar hack
<p>Original Article: <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-57520169">The Lazarus heist: How North Korea almost pulled off a billion-dollar hack </a></p> <p>Convert your long form article to podcast? Visit <a href="https://sendtopod.com">SendToPod</a></p> <br> Follow me on <a href="https://twitter.com/tuancm">Twitter</a> to find out more.<br> ---- <hr> <p></p><p>In 2016 North Korean hackers planned a $1bn raid on Bangladesh's national bank and came within an inch of success - it was only by a fluke that all but $81m of the transfers were halted, report Geoff White and Jean H Lee. But how did one of the world's poorest and most isolated countries train a team of elite cyber-criminals?</p><p>It all started with a malfunctioning printer. It's just part of modern life, and so when it happened to staff at Bangladesh Bank they thought the same thing most of us do: another day, another tech headache. It didn't seem like a big deal. </p><p>But this wasn't just any printer, and it wasn't just any bank.</p><p>Bangladesh Bank is the country's central bank, responsible for overseeing the precious currency reserves of a country where millions live in poverty.</p><p>And the printer played a pivotal role. It was located inside a highly secure room on the 10th floor of the bank's main office in Dhaka, the capital. Its job was to print out records of the multi-million-dollar transfers flowing in and out of the bank. </p><p>When staff found it wasn't working, at 08:45 on Friday 5 February 2016, "we assumed it was a common problem just like any other day," duty manager Zubair Bin Huda later told police. "Such glitches had happened before."</p><p>In fact, this was the first indication that Bangladesh Bank was in a lot of trouble. Hackers had broken into its computer networks, and at that very moment were carrying out the most audacious cyber-attack ever attempted. Their goal: to steal a billion dollars.</p><p>To spirit the money away, the gang behind the heist would use fake bank accounts, charities, casinos and a wide network of accomplices. </p><p>But who were these hackers and where were they from?</p><p>According to investigators the digital fingerprints point in just one direction: to the government of North Korea. </p><p>SPOILER ALERT: This is the story told in the 10-episode BBC World Service podcast, The Lazarus Heist - <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xtvg9/episodes/downloads">click here to listen</a>. This article is a 20-minute read.</p><p>That North Korea would be the prime suspect in a case of cyber-crime might to some be a surprise. It's one of the world's poorest countries, and largely disconnected from the global community - technologically, economically, and in almost every other way.</p><p>Image source, Getty Images</p><p>And yet, <a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/north-korean-regime-backed-programmer-charged-conspiracy-conduct-multiple-cyber-attacks-and">according to the FBI</a>, the audacious Bangladesh Bank hack was the culmination of years of methodical preparation by a shadowy team of hackers and middlemen across Asia, operating with the support of the North Korean regime.</p><p>In the cyber-security industry the North Korean hackers are known as the Lazarus Group, a reference to a biblical figure who came back from the dead; experts who tackled the group's computer viruses found they were equally resilient.</p><p>Little is known about the group, though the FBI has painted a detailed portrait of one suspect: Park Jin-hyok, who also has gone by the names Pak Jin-hek and Park Kwang-jin. </p><p>It describes him as a computer programmer who graduated from one of the country's top universities and went to work for a North Korean company, Chosun Expo, in the Chinese port city of Dalian, creating online gaming and gambling programs for clients around the world.</p><p>While in Dalian, he set up an email address, created ...</p>
June 20, 2022
Pearl Leff | In Praise of Memorization
<p>Original Article: <a href="http://www.pearlleff.com/in-praise-of-memorization">Pearl Leff | In Praise of Memorization </a></p> <p>Try to add your own article? Visit <a href="https://sendtopod.com/player">SendToPod</a></p> <br> Follow me on <a href="https://twitter.com/tuancm">Twitter</a> to find out more.<br> ---- <hr> <p>I once worked at a small company of insanely productive engineers. They were geniuses by any account. They knew the software stack from top to bottom, from hardware to operating systems to Javascript, and could pull together in days what would take teams at other companies months to years. Between them they were more productive than any division I've ever been in, including FAANG tech companies. In fact, they had written the top-of-the-line specialized compiler in their industry — as a side project. (Their customers believed that they had buildings of engineers laboring on their product, while in reality they had less than 10.)</p> <p>I was early in my career at the time and stunned by the sheer productivity and brilliance of these engineers. Finally, when I got a moment alone with one of them, I asked him how they had gotten to where they were. </p> <p>He explained that they had been software engineers together in the intelligence units of their country's military together. Their military intelligence computers hadn't been connected to the internet, and if they wanted to look something up online, they had to walk to a different building across campus. Looking something up online on StackOverflow was a major operation. So they ended up reading reference manuals and writing down or memorizing the answers to their questions because they couldn't look up information very easily. Over time, the knowledge accumulated.</p> <hr> <p>Memorization means purposely learning something so that you remember it with muscle memory; that is, you know the information without needing to look it up.</p> <p>Every educator knows that memorization is passé in today's day and age. Facts are so effortlessly accessible with modern technology and the internet that it's understanding how to analyze them that's important. Names, places, dates, and other kinds of trivia don't matter, so much as the ability to logically reason about them. Today anything can be easily looked up. </p> <p>But as I've gotten older I've started to understand that memorization is important, much more than we give it credit for. Knowledge is at our fingertips and we can look anything up, but it's knowing what knowledge is available and how to integrate it into our existing knowledge base that's important. </p> <ul><li>You Can't Reason Accurately Without Knowledge </li></ul> <p>You know a lot of things. </p> <p></p> <br> A lot of life involves reasoning: taking this information you have and making hypotheses that connect different pieces in a way that provides a deeper understanding of them. <p></p> The more information you have muscle memory for, the more you can use to reason about. <p></p> <p>But you can't draw connections between things you don't know exist, or don't have a good "feel" for.</p> <p>The problem with not memorizing is that you're limited by the lack of data points, or nodes that you can make connections between. In short, you're limited by your lack of understanding of what to look up. </p> <p>Here's a small illustration. </p> <p>Many would argue that there is no point for kids to memorize the world map today. But if you know basic geography, you will hear all kinds of political analysis that only works because the person arguing it doesn't have any idea where anything is on a map. This is the problem with not making school kids learn basic geography. You can look up any country on Google, but if you've never had to memorize approximately where they are, either voluntarily or in school, you'll never get a sense of why things are the way they a...</p>
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