In the news

Look. Thames Water only upgrades infrastructure every prime numbered monarch. It's not their fault EII is one of the longest reigning monarch ever. Better hope Chuck does't step aside.

2 is a prime number

Probably a typo, meant to say every super-primed number monarch.

Here's a map of the proposed route;

https://www.alternatehistory.com/forum/threads/proposed-grand-contour-canal-built-in-the-uk-sooner.368665/

Fuck this government.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-39878456

and every cunt who votes for them.

Fuck them too. I hope they all get fucked to death by dogs.

Really fucked to death. Dog's cocks in eye sockets and stuff.

(None of this is a euph or a metaphor.)

Don't hold back

+1 and amen @HatBeard @johnnyhotdog

Hey but those poor people probably mismanaged their money/were lazy/there's no money/all the other shit people say to justify it...

Sarcasm aside, time to donate to our local food banks etc? Fareshare also takes £ donations if that's handier :)

5% unemployment, 6th largest economy in the world, and then this. I mean, come the fuck. The place is sick.

Do the fifth and seventh largest economies in the world have government employees relying on food banks, etc etc?

http://uk.businessinsider.com/jeremy-hunt-was-warned-of-urgent-need-to-update-nhs-cyber-security-2017-5

If i had to make a list of people who would happily put thousands of lives at risk to earn some money for themselves Jeremy Hunt would be feature pretty highly. are we sure he didn't install the virus?

Seen some speculation that the ransom-ware was a smoke screen for something else, take code from last months dump release and then target specific machines under the cover of a global attack.

Yeah, possibly.

There's a Radiolab episode, Darkcode, where a woman gives into ransomware demands and decides to pay. It was a pretty laborious process with extensive one-to-one human communication just to unlock a single PC. If this current attack uses a similar method when reaping the gains, then they will need to employ a huge army of 'customer reps'. I'm guessing that the more people they hire, the bigger the risk of being found out?

I doubt even those that pay will get anywhere. Payments going to just 3 bitcoin wallets? Those wallets are now being watched. How do you prove /you/ paid?

Also seen some code analysis that suggests that there may not be a decryption routine.

Given the shonkyness of the kill-url implementation (one fixed url, vs 5 random ones in another virus), and the suggestion that this was to stop it being analysed (not really a kill switch), I suspect the above may be correct.

My take on it is that it's actually been far more successful that the creators had thought that it would be. I don't think that any private (rather than state) actor would have wanted this to happen, as the attention makes it harder to withdraw the ransom from its bitcoin wallet

You can watch those wallets all you like, if they know what they are doing you won't be able to follow the money. I have witnessed much bigger fraudulent activities on the BTC network that were watched live by hundreds of security experts. It doesn't take too much effort to disappear the funds if you want to.

You can prove you paid because there will be a unique transaction ID that is associated with the private key of the address you sent the BTC from.

Just to give some context, yesterday there were $437,000,000 worth of transactions on the Bitcoin network, sent in 359,000 transactions. Really quite easy to tumble your BTC and lose it in that volume given that you can generate an unlimited number of addresses to split the illegal funds through.

And if you couldn't be bothered to do that you could just exchange your BTC for one of the truly anonymous cryptocurrencies like Pivx, Dash or Monero and there would be literally zero chance of anybody ever being able to trace the money.

Mostly I'm not convinced that they do know what they're doing.

I'd like to know if any of those that have paid (and people have, helpful twitter feed to watch it happening here -https://twitter.com/actual_ransom ) have been decrypted. I strongly suspect not.

Well, colour me blue. Apparently some people are getting unlocked, with manually generated keys. https://twitter.com/mikko/status/864107673146490880

Two observations here.

1) It would be poor business sense to not unlock computers...people just wouldn't pay the ransom.

2) Why on earth aren't they using smart contracts tied to the bitcoin blockchain to automate the unlocking process?

How many people that are still using Windows XP know what a flipping Bitcoin is?

Kelvin Mackenzie sadly fired from the sun rather than into it.

Paaaaarty time when that fucker karks it.

banks