‘You Hacked, ALL Data Encrypted’
 

Hackers are holding San Francisco’s light-rail system for ransom
http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/27/1...rsecurity-muni

oops, Windows 2000? :k_confused:

I just giggle.

I wouldn't laugh. This stuff hasn't just been hitting big businesses and government, its also been hitting ordinary people and charities too. If you get it you are well and truly screwed, as there is virtually no way of decrypting the data without paying a bunch of money in ransom, and it is becoming more and more common. It's becoming a serious problem due to how successful it is, and how little effort it takes.

Plus it can hit virtually any operating system version, and type, and antivirus often isn't effective in stopping it.

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. :03:

Which is why backups are so important.

MaDef is right... but I never have anything stored on the pc that I can't afford to lose: all sensitive stuff is written down on paper or stored on a non-internet device. As far as I know, then, the most hassle I would face is a re-install.

And my oh my how proud that little clock is when that happens.

You got my giggles wrong. Usually I am the one who gets giggled about when telling tales of horror and apocalypse regarding these things, you see.

I am quite aware of the immense vulnerabilties and dangers. Thats why I warn of them so often. And get just giggles in return. So this time I giggled - in revenge.

Crime. But technical failures as well. Just the past 24 hours Germany was hit by a practically nation-wide breakdown of internet and web-basing telephones. Once again, has happened before. Since they switch telephones to VoIP, telephones have become as reliable as back in the early 70s again. They call that "improved services". I need to relaunch by router at least once a day. I have down-times at leats once per week. My hometown where I live is considered to be a Telekom-well-supplied region, and a hotspot.

Very stupid to give up the independeant telephone wire network. Very stupid to turn all communicaiton into one single "monoculture" with practically no redundacy in the network. If the web fails, all communicaiton shut down. Stupid. To abuse Patton: monocultures are monuments for the stupidity of man.

I have diversified internet, telephone, cellphone and TV on four different distributors/sources. Costs me more money, yes. But leaves me with options if one fails. Which happens often. In the civilised first high tech world named Germany, city with 380 thousand people. Hilarious.

Oh yeah, you never hear the end of it. :dead:

Since I mentioned it above, Telekom now says they have indices that they fell victim to an external hacker attack.

Routers in almost one million households/offices are temporarily or for lasting effect offline since yesterday afternoon. All router-depending services in these households/offices are affected.

Possible that the routers were directly attacked, it seems not every router model but only certain product lines are affected. So much for hardware-sided firewalls.

Nightmare scenario for friends of black humour: stockmarkets go rock-bottom, you desperately want to place orders to sell - and cannot. Imagination can plot easily according criminal attack scenarios.

^^ I had posted this in a wrong thread originally, and so moved it here where it was intended to be anyway.

German Federal Office for IT Security (BSI) now says it was an external attack of even greater proportions, and that governmental IT networks had been under attack as well.

It is feared that this also is just a systematic testrun, like there seem to have been several ones over the past months, directed against Western companies and nations. Somebody seems to test out Western IT infrastructure and its typical vulnerability and potential for abuse since quite some time now. Say insiders and security experts. Many fingers point at Russia. But it could also be non-national hacker groups wanting to land a big coup in the future, at some international conference. The ID of the attacker(s) are not known.

Best policy if possible is to have nothing on your system you wouldn't want anyone else to access but that is obviously easier said than done in this day and age.

They now know that the attack indeed was an attack for sure, and that it was much bigger. The attacker was a known bot net named "Mirai", which tried to make the attacked routers part of its botnet structure.

This is very worrying news, since Mirai also is behind several other major sized attacks across the globe this year, especially in Europe. In all these cases the goal was to hijack household devices and/or the so-called internet-of-things as well as weakly secured business networks and office stations, to include them into the botnet and by this creating kind of s super weapon - obviously for a huge attack in the future, probably to take out the data ifnrastructure completely. The apst attacks have thus been described by IT security expwerts as most likely testruns only. Weapon tests.

Could be Russia. Could be a political activist hacker group. Could be organised crime.

This has been the third such weapon test within just a couple of weeks. It kostly failed this time (the others were inb parts or mostly successful), but the attacked routers as a consequences of that bogged attack could not connect to the web anymore and needed new firmware and cold boot.

Which is a happy end. Else we might not even have noticed that 1 million routers in Germany got hijacked by Mirai - and now would work for it or could be calle dup to work for it any time.

Your household becomes part of the warzone, your possessions and belongings become weapons in this war. Just that you have no word in this war, do not know your masters, and maybe even do not realise that you are getting abused as drones. Just the casualties, the costs - these will be yours.

Yes. A warzone.

Resist as you can - or forfeit your right to later complain.

Especially: PAY CASH and INSIST ON CASH PAYMENT - always, everywhere. Boycott everybody not accepting cash anymore. If that means to avoid Sweden and Norway (wich by new laws ban use of cash) for holiday, do it. There are other nice countries to travel to.

Going digitally not necessarily always is better. And in some instances, it is the nightmare option that you should want to avoid at all cost.

"Dogs bite people."
"What? Ok, I am never going outside again!"



Sorry, that's not going to happen. Not going to go back to the stone age just because of some risk.

Total government control over your possessions by forcing you to not save them materially on your side, but exposing them to bank and state plundering - your savings, pensions, money, everything, in digital format and thus being able to make you pay for anything the government sees legit - hows that as a motivation to insist on cash money being kept, eh?

In other words: freedom.

All my savings and treasury - is not at the bank anymore. ;)

There are reasons why they try so unforgivingly to kill cash money, the Rogoffs and Bernankes of this world.

Wake up. I am not caveman from the stone-age.

Ok, I know you don't see it, but being alarmist doesn't equate to being a sage. Yes, there is risk in living in the modern world, and using a bank and a credit card, but it is manageable. It's not a big deal. There's a lot of risk to having all your savings under the mattress, too, or carrying $5000 cash with you all the time.

If you're so worried about the hidden puppetmasters pulling the rug out from under you, maybe you should divest yourself of cash too, and go back to bartering real, actual goods. After all, what is cash, but another form of credit? You should get rid of those marks before the Rothschilds plunge the currency into another round of inflation.

People can always use chickens. They also lay eggs. See if your landlord will accept chickens for payment.

:sign_yeah: There is also numerous software available whereby you can encrypt your own data. However, it's always a good idea to back up your information.

Alarmism has nothing to do with it. The massive redistribution and the expropriation to make ordinary people pay with their pensions and savings for the debts risen by political parties and politicians and banks, negative interest rates and all that - that is reality.

Also, if you have money at your bank, on your bank account, at your bank, you are de facto an investor, not different to holding stocks. You bet that the money manages well and you get a share from its profit. in times of so-called "negative interest", this is illusional. But more important, you have to pay for the bank if it manages bad or get hit by disaster. Investors risk.

Such a thing like "negative interest" does not exist. The direction at which "interest" flows, is one way per definition, not possibly both ways, depending on times. It flows from leaser to lender, never th eother way around. Negative interests are no interests, they are fees at the cost of the investor - who of course is no investor then, but an idiot.

In Germany, deposit insurance "guarantee" :D deposits of up to 100.000 Euro per person. But already this low level means that if this guarantee ever gets called up in huge numbers becasue one bank suffers a meltdown, there would be more demand for "money" than there is real money available. The discrepancy exceeds a factor of at least 75. In such a scenario, if you have more money on your bank account, you probably simply lose it. Period. Which serves you right. you were an investor, you had a right to bid on profits when opening a bank account and save money there - and you had to accept the risks. You played, you lost. Next.

The turmoils this could - and will - cause in real economy, if the trigger is just big enough, will mean a massive drop in stocks indices. This is becasue companies gpoing bancrupt and cannot work anymore, loose their value, and so does their stocks. So when you think you did clever by buying stocks, I tell you - you cannot avoid to nevertheless live dangerously. History shows this impressively. I mean none of all what I say is new - we have been there before, haven't we.

If you hold physicla precious metals, there could be prohibition at any time, if it serves the politicians' interest to keep the show running and themselves starringatf the party.

I am surprised that a capitalist like you - at least I take you for one - so comfortably ignores all this, Neal. Just for that tiny piece of plastic in your hand.

Worst news of all, is this, imo: the old reasonable rules, those that modern alchemists started to ignore and to ridicule - even these rules seem to have no validity anymore. the system'S inner dynamic has become so unpredictable and instabile that just anything could happen, anytime, and nothign is ruled out. you cannot calculate probabilities and base your decision on that anymore, that has become an illusion. In other words, as I see it the situation is so disastrous that practically every form of investing has become - a gamble from A to Z: stocks, gold, property, cash money - everything. Because probabilties mean nothign anymore, and just anythig can happen just any moment. That bad it is. There is no responsible way of investing anymore, it all is becominging gambling now. And the banks want everybody to get him forced to participate - at his cost. Investing, and gambling - are two very different things. To buy a tiny bit of time.

With every single time you pay via credit card instead of notes and coins, you signal and vote that you accept credit card payment, and you make it more likely that the banning of cash money comes even earlier, like now in Scandinavia where they now will enforce it by law. You then will not only pay seldomly with cash money in Sweden - we will be prohibited and will find it impossible to pay with anythign different than a credit card there. Money becomes illegal.

Last but not least, digital payment means record keeping. You have nothing but lame words as promises for that these records will ever be deleted. Every single pack of bubble gum you pay for, will be recorded. And who knows. Maybe there once will be a time when bubble gum is considered to be illegal, or makes you a social outcast. And then these records will be dug out and used against you. Or a deale long ago can be used to compromise your reputation, to character-assassinate you. It will be done. And laws will not prevent this. Insurance companies will read these records, and draw their conclusions, and set your payments accordingly - if they even accept you. You may not get that job, and will not even know why you were not accepted. They know, however - they read your history of past spendings and buyings, leading them to conclusions about you.

Not even mentioning the profiling options for targetted commercials and avertising.

But the worst thing in all this is that people will be forced to expose their private property and savings to plunderings by the state by needing to chnage material wealth for imagined digital "wealth" that can be exproriated with a pressing of a button. No defence possible. Thats is the top on reason why cahs money should get banned, all other reasons are strawman arguments only.

If that does not worry you, Neal, considering the disastrous state of the "money" system, then nothing ever will frighten you in life. Again, that is no alarmism at all. Its fact, and already happens right now, day in and day out.

In Cyprus, savings above some treshhold of I think 500.000 Euros some years ago got plundered by the state, the bank deposits held by people simply got automatically sacked by the state-ordered ratio. And nothing the owners of this property could do against it, if they had it at the bank. In India just tne days ago they have sacked all banknots of the highest and second highest value - a state with over one billion people. They want to force people to bring money back to the bank in an effort to chnage the old notes for new, smaller ones. They say it is against corruption, but truth is - they want to make people handing their money over to the banks so that the state can control these properties better - and tax and plunder them more easily.

Modern state thinks it must control and overwatch all and everything. That too is part of the promise of socialism. Net takers applaude it. Net givers obviously not.


And if you think you are safe when holding your values in physicla gold and store it in a hideout in a safe, then again any time some ruthless politicians can have a law that prohibits the private possession of gold. That will be the time when i consider even the use of violence to fight this state as a valid, morally demanded option. Needless to say: the masses get told they will socially benefit from these plunderings, will applaude all this, they are net receivers (takers). That is how socialism ticks.

In then end, Neal, you are opening the idea of private property, and the basic natural right to own private porperty, for negotiations and indicate you can accept to let this idea go. The stronger the state, the less freedom and the less right to own property. That simple it is.

And it is already happening. In your country. In mine. And guys like you just turn away and close their eyes. so many are like this. Just not caring, just not imagining to give up that "comfort" of plastic money.

Cash payment over here is more than twice as fast as credit card payment, btw. The health argument (germs on notes and such), has been debunked. The crime argument has been revealed as a myth already. There are no pragmatic arguments in defence of credict card money. And still they want to enforce it, against all resistence, against all reason, against all arguments, against all warning.

And you do not even wonder why, but being annoyed by "alarmism"...?

If you people would do damage just to yourself, I could accept that and live with that, it would not need to concern me. But you guys pull people like me down the drain alongside with you. And that is the only real injustice here, the mean thing you all are guilty of - that you ruin it not just for yourself, but for all others' future as well. You do not even stop before the interest of your children's future but encourage them to continue the mistakes you have started with.

Alarmism...? No, Neal. Freedom. The right to own property all alone, all yourself. Else it is not private property.

On a more theoretical level, the big disaster that economy theory has fallen into is that it has chosen to completely ignore the meaning and importance of money, it has taken the need of money totally out of all its highflying, cleverly spinning formulas. And this spells disaster. Money gets ignored, gets seen as an invalid variable that has no meaning. But money is what grout is for a wall of bricks. We will need to learn that again the rock-hard way. And we will. It will become brutal.

Why should I silently accept to be punished for your, the majority's sins? Its what the ancient Greek called ochlocracy, the tyranny of the majority over the minority. The tyranny of the plebs. Today we mislabel this as democracy. What a cruel joke of history.

Is this another thread you are keeping politics out of, Skybird?

I'm actually in most ways in agreement with Skybird. The different trends going on right now are rather alarming. The populous on average is getting poorer, while that 0.00001% are becoming more wealthy at an almost exponential rate. I am seeing all kinds of systems of control and observation being steadily put into place, with computers being a massive vulnerability to personal privacy. The corporate world in particular has been at the head of these constant attempts to data-mine people so as to get even more money from them.

There is just so much happening on so many levels, which will have really bad consequences to the average person, on virtually ever aspect of that person's life. At every turn our rights are being eroded, laws are being changed to favor the wealthy or the powerful. People are being psychologically manipulated like never before. The education system across the globe is functionally being destroyed, to disrupt the intelligentsia. Intelligent engaging radical professors are being slowly purged in favor of bland inoffensive teachers that will tow the line.

The world is becoming a more dangerous place, and almost no one is paying attention any more, as we are being turned into completely egocentric entities that only care about self gratification and utter selfishness, who no longer think for themselves at all, who only rely on news sources that feed their own monologue. As long as I get what I want, who cares.


Mark my words, things are going to get a lot worse over the next few decades for all of us.