Bitcoin.
There wasn't much purpose to 'hacking' for a long time. Even when
talking about DDoS stuff, it's still just temporary vandalism, it's only
an inconvenience, and it can be undone pretty quickly. The whole idea
of providing security has been turned into a wink-wink scam where people
pretend to do busy work for money but everyone knows you'll still get
breached and it doesn't really matter, so long as you can blame it on
someone else and it's in the fine print. Look at what a business DDoS
has become, both on the provider and the protection side.
Stealing data is also a thing but even that is not inherently valuable
unless you can blackmail the victim or sell it to a buyer. That kind of
business requires more skills than just computer hacking to pull off,
and carries a lot of risk in dealing with other humans who already know
you're a data thief.
This all changed with bitcoin, because now simply gaining access and
finding the data is the pay dirt and it can be claimed anonymously
without dealing with any other humans.
-Laszlo
On 2020-12-12 22:26, Peter E. Fry wrote:
Simple question: What's the purpose of obtaining illicit access to
random devices on the Internet these days, considering that a large
majority of attacks are now launched from cheap, readily available and
poorly managed/overseen "cloud" services? Finding anything worthwhile
to steal on random machines on the Internet seems unlikely, as does
obtaining access superior (in e.g. location, bandwidth, anonymity,
etc.) to the service from which the attack was launched.
I was thinking about this the other day as I was poking at my
firewall, and hopped onto the archives (here and elsewhere) to see if
I could find any discussion. I found a few mentions (e.g. "Microsoft
is hacking my Asterisk???"), but I didn't catch any mention of
purpose. Am I missing something obvious (either a purpose or a
discussion of such)? Have I lost my mind entirely? (Can't hurt to
check, as I'd likely be the last to know.)
Peter E. Fry
