‘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.