Bitcoin Forum

To prevent any further ransomware I would highly suggest to use RansomFree here https://ransomfree.cybereason.com/
There is a demo how it works and it is the best app i ever seen to protect our selfs and here is the demo to see how it works  https://ransomfree.cybereason.com/demo/

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Recently the San Francisco Metro System got Hacked with Ransomware resulting in free rides.


What do you think guys?
Isn't it bad for the bitcoin to be known as a bad thing in our lives?
*If it was posted before move to the correct board.

It's funny that it's hackers who are forcing mainstream to adopt crypto at virtual gunpoint.

Why would you pay the $70,000? Morons, what if they are lying and you are still hacked after paying?

If this is true then this is really bad for bitcoin users, but it would only be fatal users from san francisco. Well, this would only happen if the government would act. Unless this is a dumbass for them to consider this as a waste of time then probably nothing would really happen to bitcoin users from san fran.

Ransomware make it usually pretty obvious that the system is compromised. Like with encrypting all the data and showing you a big flashy prompt that you need to pay XY BTC to get the decryption key.

But in this way it is not good.

I haven't paid but the San Francisco Metro System institution paid because there was no other way to fix what happened.
Work or not you have to pay if you want to get back the files.

hmm funny i always though US laws didn't allow them to pay any kind of ransom to hackers!

besides didn't they already break some of the code that ransomeware uses, i remember reading on reddit that it is possible to decrypt those files, maybe it was a certain type of ransomeware.

There are some places like nomoreransom.org/crypto-sheriff.php and noransom.kaspersky.com
But maybe this ransomware was a new one or more complicated, I haven't heard about that law you are talking about.

I'm actually kind of surprised that they managed to get a ransomware virus into the SF metro system without it being some kind of inside job. I could be wrong, but it seems kind of weird that such a system would be exposed like that.

It was probably in their best interest to pay the ransom and get their data back, but they should spend some time and figure out what went wrong first.

It is supposed that someone inside has downloaded something or have clicked on an executable program from emails.
I think that the lesson has been learned so they can see what was wrong and prevent this in the future.

Those who make such malicious programs targeted large systems like SF Metro System,it is much easier to get ransom from them but from small users.Some wonder why they paid and answer is simple.,They need files back and they did not have a backup,which would save them from paying ransom.

Some older versions of ransomware can be decrypted,but for new version only help is to have backup or to pay.

It is bad for BTC when such news go in public,but there is nothing we can do right now.People should keep an eye on what they click and make regular backup of important files.

So the hackers gave the people of San Fran free metro rides lol that's hilarious. It's not strange they decided to proceed with paying the ransom because they would have incurred a lot more losses in running costs over the period of not getting any profit from tickets. Some dude on a late night shift was prolly checking some shady sites and got a present in the meantime ::)

It ecrypt the whole system and the MBRs to prevent systems from booting up properly but there is only a loss on tickets nothing huge.
But this caused them to shut down ticket kiosks and make rides free this weekend.
Overall this is not good for bitcoin because bitcoin is getting popular in a negative way not as something useful and positive.

Yeah certainly things like this can make government to think twice before accepting bitcoin or allowing bitcoin trading business within country. Anonymity of bitcoin have also created several problems like this, that hacker can run away without being detected. However san francisco metro system seems to be more responsible for not having better security in their systems rather than bitcoin being payment method for hacker.

don't tell me that they opened "that" email once again, like a bunch of moron, it's again not bitcoin fault but only their fault to be idiot, those same hacker can steal your credit card credentials easily, never head of skimming? but no one accuses the fiat system for this

The way some of these organizations react to hacking,tells me they are way in over their heads. Shutting down all the terminals, shows that they think they can stop the spread,not realizing he already had control. Bitcoin is just to easy to use and hackers tend to know the latest tech on the scene. ;)

How did they manage to let ransomware into the San Fran metro system? It's just so unbelievable that something like that could happen without some super gross negligence on some employee's part.

They're lucky that the ransomware actually did go and decrypt their files, but at the same time the $70,000 was probably low enough that the designer didn't think that it would be worth screwing the people that paid him. Good on them for that portion.

They should feel relieved by the hack

They are aware of the security holes their system have
They paid a heavy price for a hacker instead of invested in cyber-security - most US companies ignore the risks
It was not a terrorist cyber attack that could have been worse.

Personally, I would not have paid 70000$ in bitcoin because you encourage people to continue this unethical way to commit a crime in exchange for a compensation. I think is very important companies take the securities very seriously or otherwise you will see another news like that on the internet. Do you think the clients will be happy to hear that the company hacked...

It is bad for Bitcoin. We had visitors last week, and the husband did not know that I am a Bitcoin enthusiast. He started to tell me that he lost

all his Holiday videos and pics, due to some virus that blocked his files and then they wanted.. "something called Bitcoin" to unlock his files. I

sat their red faces, because he blamed this "Bitcoin" technology for what happened to him. I explained to him what Bitcoin was, and that the

technology was not to be blamed for the hack, but he did not want to hear anything about Bitcoin, because he blamed it for his loss.  >:(

This isn't really a problem with Bitcoin, and should not make Bitcoin look bad. Bitcoin is primarily used in these because there are automated set of tools that help you create malware (e.g. ransomware) and they just take a % cut of the Bitcoin gathered this way. If the attackers were after better anonymity and not script-kiddies, they would not be asking for Bitcoin.

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Here is an example of such a website called Tox (https://securityzap.com/tox-ransomware-creator/). However, this website was on sale the last time I encountered it. I'm sure that there are plenty more out there.


A ransomware attack is ridiculously easy to mitigate with a backup (in comparison to other advanced malware). You just need to wipe everything and restore via a backup. If you don't have a backup, then the only one that should be blamed is yourself.

Not really a bad point, like they say all news is good news, people are wondering what this bitcoin thing is?  lol   fiat money was used by criminals for 100's of years it didnt do fiat any harm......... ;)

I am thinking this is an inside job too. I am refusing to believe one of the employees of the SFM was stupid and dumb enough to click an email link just out of the blue. I think employees there are trained before starting to work in such big workplace.

Ransomware is very easy to defend yourself from when you know a few tech things. Also nothing to do with Bitcoin, Bitcoin in this case is just an easy way to blackmail and get paid with. It's a new form of money (internet money that can be converted to cash easily) so that's why hackers who are the most tech knowers will want to use it.

Again, the only fault was from SFM, I have high doubts of an inside job or in the worst a worker there have send this ransomware file to all his colleagues knowing their little level of information regarding ransomware, he may have tried his luck and he has hit the jackpot.

As soon as someone sees ransomware and then they look for "bitcoin" in the news article instantly. And 80% of the time they are right.
Someone was saying this is what Zcash's sole purpose was from it's inception. Created just for the reason of being more anonymous than bitcoin will ever be and being better to demand in such cases.

That is a positive way to look at it. A big fee to a security specialist to help secure their system.

They will not adopt bitcoin,they will adopt better network/system security softwares.They might buy bitcoin to pay for ransome to hackers but one time buy that too forcibly is not adoption IMO

This is "magic". The virus is spread very fast on the network and these kind of viruses/malwares are the worst one.
And they are made by the most professional hackers because a random/newbie hacker can't do these things.

stop use attached files with email ?
they have tried ... but PDF and DOC are too powerfull over ... directors (specially PPS files).

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/a/img924/2747/DpWHd8.gif





Randsomeware works because of people ... not because of machine.

There annual budget is probably 100x that. $70,000.00 is nothing to them. And the ransomers new that. But yeah they look stupid.

This is good and bad for bitcoin.

It`s bad becasue hackers use it and it`s good for the same reason. ;D Just kidding.

By the way,what exactly is a ransomware?Malware that asks for ransome?

Well, with every revolutionary technology there are drawbacks. What we need is stronger software protection against ramsomware, the stupid thing to do would be to get rid of bitcoin. It's like, why not get rid of the entire internet so that way we can avoid all hackers? No thanks, just fix your shit up, but dont blame it on bitcoin.

this is the only downside of bitcoin, the fact that its anonymity is allowing criminals to get away with things like this and use bitcoin as their filthy methods to extort people out of their money. and the worst part of it is what the media is going to do with news like this when they get their hands on it, they will show bitcoin as a criminal money and it hurts bitcoin's reputation a lot.

Sorry for their loss :( In fact my computer have hacked for bitcoin ransom before, while we decided not to pay it and finally found a way to overcome that.

These hacking-news is indeed having negative impacts on bitcoin's public image, especially those bitcoin haters who don't like us just because they are 'new' (they are older people who also hate Internet etc.). However for the only good side is that there will be some buy orders on BTC and it will rise in price...

Ransomware is a software that encrypts your hard drive and every other attached storage device.
In order to get access to your data again, the software asks you to pay a certain amount (usually in bitcoin).
After that you get a key that decrypts your drives again.
At least that is what the software tells you. If you really get it, I would doubt that.

Normal backup is not good enough. You will have to do full backups daily and weekly and monthly and store them offline. If you do

incremental backups, and the Malware is replicated, then all your preceding copies will be infected. This way, you can go back to previous

copies, until you find a copy that were not infected. Some people just overwrite their previous backups and then include the Malware in all

subsequent copies. { Then they cannot go back to previous "clean" backups to restore }   

Even bitcoin get the famous because the hacker information lost, we can see how the fiat system are weeks against hackers, for one side i do see bitcoin as revolutionary currencie, but for other side now hackers can get their money without be traced, this makes bitcoin a big problem, but those big companies should think into a way to protect their system, improve the security, instead of being paying to hackers, but they dont learn security its the main problem, and where they have to invest.

Things like these have been happening over, and over, and over again. The conclusion we can take from all these ransom cases is that this goes way beyond Bitcoin, it's about people's mentality who still prefer to be sorry than safe. Companies and governments see tech employees as "uneeded" or "only fit for emergencies" and simply don't hire them. When problems arise, they start calling these people like they would call 911 if somebody was dying...

They didn't invest on their security and probably didn't even have backups of important files...

it is a big amount of money to be paid for data. but probably the data contains more important things than $73,000.

yeah, it is bad for bitcoin to be known as a bad things. that makes our family and people around think that we are criminals because we use bitcoin.

And by that, they dont need to take the ransom money personally. This is how smart the people are today. This is the real problem of bitcoin. It can be use for any crimes. But it is not the fault of bitcoin. It is the fault of San Francisco Metro System because they did not secure their files.

For sure they are going to blame bitcoin. This things really makes bitcoin so bad. But bitcoin has nothing to do with this mess. This is just a bridge to tranfer funds or the ransom. Its the fault of the San Francisco Metro System in the first place. If they have a better security., this is not going to happen.

Yeah, it's like blaming the ransom cash that is demanded when a kidnapper kidnaps a victim. It's not the cash's fault. No one ever blames the ransom money when a kidnapping crime occurs.

It's as if Bitcoin is the only guilty party involved in the crime and the actual criminal(s) are overlooked and not even given a second thought.

No idea how you wouldn't notice that everything you need is being encrypted as you go but I guess it hasn't ever happened to me. 70k. Wow. I guess they had them by the proverbial balls eh?

Why do some people still do not see that this is just one of the many use cases of Bitcoin? Moving value easily across borders without the use banks is the main contribution of the technology. Why not embrace it and accept that bad things do happen with or without Bitcoin.

This is not a bad thing to bitcoin but to the users who use it in illicit activities. With the events that had happened the government around the globe might end up regulating the use of bitcoin, creating poilicies and other laws including agencies to monitor how online currencies including cryptocurrencies moves. Soon bitcoin will be under the eyes of the government, taxable and monitored.

I'm surprised that they actually paid the ransom. This exemplifies the incompetence of the officials in maintaining and operating critical infrastructure. The operators of the system should have paid it out of their own private pockets and then being kicked out of public service for lifetime.

Of course it can be bad for the public perception of Bitcoin, because a lot of people are unable to differentiate and unwilling to blame themselves for gross negligence. Instead of blaming the hackers and the officials, dumb journalists will quickly point to Bitcoin, because it is another new thing they don't understand.

ya.ya.yo!

Well the bad thing has more effect rather than the good thing because people will have in their mind the dirty bitcoin not the good bitcoin.
What ransomware is? It is a software (malware/virus/etc..) which encrypts your all data in PC and asks you to pay the hacker in bitcoin in order to get the decryption key and get back your files!

oh i think a lot of cases like this happened out there
make bitcoin popular as evil currency to make a ransomware transaction
this is just another bitcoin abuse , it's normal i think
as in paypal there is a feature called dispute and chargeback and they frequently misuse it too for scam attempts.

Currently except for a worldwide ban there is not much governments of the world can do to stop bitcoin, in fact a ban on bitcoin may even help adoption grow like what happened to drugs.

It's not like any ban on bitcoin is technically enforceable, they can hurt exchanges though.

Very effective anti-virus packages are available for as little as $10 (purchased one just last month from Amazon). Yet, the San Francisco Metro decided that they are too expensive. I guess now they are too happy to pay 7,000x that amount.

no amount of antivirus protection can protect against all the attacks and when it comes to a system with many people accessing it, the problem becomes bigger. because when you are the only user of a computer you can always be careful about what you do but when multiple people have access only one person is enough to be targeted for the infection it can be an email or other methods the hackers use to infect the whole system through an idiotic employee.

Wrong, Bitcoin can be traced, even if you run it through a mixer service. The tx's are logged in the Blockchain forever. The authorities just have to

subpoena the mixer services for the information. It is a lengthy procedure, so they will not do that for every little hack. The people that used the

Silkroad site, also thought they were anonymous, and then look what happened to Ross.

Ransomware will attack more and more via various ways, even when you install free software, you can not be safe from ransomware. I remember even if you install through servers, you can get ransomware.

When someone is victimized like this, they don't hate bitcoin. They loath it, with a visceral kind of disgust that prevents their ever seeing it as something they would choose to use. It is the tool of their enemy and persecuter.

So if the bitcoin community wants to survive and thrive, we need to figure out how to destroy the ability of ransomware hackers to utilize bitcoin. Either that or track the hackers down and make them wish to God they had turned themselves into the police rather than facing vigilante justice designed to ensure that no one ever makes the same choice they made.

Yes, savage vigilante justice because that's what god uses against us. Spoken like a true Christian. If we don't agree with them, burn them at the stake, stone them or wage war against them.

https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-UDySxyuAE-Y/VGTHFG6eqGI/AAAAAAAABdQ/J7x-oBVL3bc/s1600/hell%2Bno.gif

They probably spent money on that, the problem like always resides with the user, probably a dumb employee opened an email or inserted an infected usb and that is why everything happen, I don't see why regular employees have access to computers with access to the Internet because I don't think the San Francisco metro needs to have its employees connected to the Internet to perform their job.

What? That is a very simplistic way of looking at things. Almost all Windows users have bought into the scam of antivirus software, yes? Then why are a big percentage of Windows users still a victim of hackers, malware, viruses, trojans, etc...?

Did you not think that the whole antivirus industry could be a scam? Seeing how the world works today, it could be.

Sorry, that was intemperate, wasn't it? I should not have encouraged vigilante action. It's just that I don't have much confidence in secular western judicial systems and their coddling of criminals. (In the United States, for example, the government is so far off the rails of the Constitution that there is no meaningful legitimate government to honor per Romans 13 without dishonoring the Constitution, which is supposed to be our highest human authority.)

But on the flip side you make it sound ("don't agree with them") as if it is just a matter of opinion that what they are doing is wrong, such that it's just intolerant bigots who would lift a finger against them. If we were arguing about what to put on a pizza that would be a matter of opinion. By contrast these are clearly immoral criminal acts of theft and destruction of property.

So I'll moderate my remarks and just ask that if and when authorities catch up with them, that they require the criminals to provide full restitution plus 20% for all the time and money and headaches involved in their activities. They should also be required to personally apologize to any of their victims who is willing to give them a hearing.

Oh, sorry. I didn't realize you were from America. You're response is perfectly understandable then.

http://all-len-all.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/grandma-gun.png

Thanks for sharing, OP.

I loves amuricuh where the moto is if it ain't deep fried I ain't not throwing that down my gullet uhhhhhyuckhyuck. Pass the *belch* beer kay hun? I can't get up OUTTA my lazyboy when Springer's on. You know that. or something similar.
But seriously wtf. Ya let's have a real life purge right? That should resolve everything.

http://i63.tinypic.com/2qth736.jpg

Everything has a negative side for which we can't completely ignore it. During the initial days as a value storage coin bitcoin was used much for illegal needs. Later on continued development has made it a high growing investment. So some using it on illegal needs will get into trap soon on improved security advancements.

Ironically, you match my perception of the average American pretty closely, speaking as an anti-American dissident.

I'm sure you value reason as much as the next person, so I would remind you that tactics like your photo are the tactics of someone who has lost, and is now trying to use emotion and irrationality to change/avoid the subject. Ironically there was no reason to do so, as I'd conceded my error in the first place.

I have updated the OP with some useful links where is helpful for everybody.
It's good to use an app like RansomFree to protect our PC(s) from ransomwares because it's really dangerous this kind of virus.

I don't understand why people would get so upset when ransomware happens,
as this really isn't very different from a hard drive failure, for example.

Also 10 seconds on google gets you links like this:
http://betanews.com/2016/04/27/remove-cryptxxx-ransomware/

and even if you cant decrypt your files now, there will likely be solutions
within a year.

But you cannot fix stupid.

70000 dollars is a huge money ,and there s a huge possibilty that i tmight again get hacked and u will cry over again.

Hopefully, now they have learnt their lesson, and will be taking the adequate precautions. Either they should employ an IT security agent, or they should outsource this work to some agency which is good in providing security against these sort of crimes. That said, I am glad that Bitcoin received a nice amount of publicity as a result of this hack.

I guess it's good that tools like this exist for regular users who are more prone to falling victim to ransomware, but it's quite easy to protect yourself from it without having to use any tools.

1. Don't just download and open files from untrusted sources.
2. Add Noscript and uBlock to your browser and make sure you disable all external plugins like Flash and Java.

By following these simple rules the chances of getting infected should be absolutely minimal.

Well, not good publicity but it's publicity nonetheless. Being just a new bitcoin user I've notice that anonymity is both bitcoin's good and bad trait. Hopefully next time hacking incidents happen they don't blame it on bitcoin coz it's very easy to put blame on things you can't understand.

$70k is huge money? That's less than I paid for my Mercedes. They couldn't even buy my car for their ransom.

Simply when you are looking something and you don't think about the consequences then this happened.
Because if we look for a patch/crack then this can probably happen and we disable the antivirus to install the keygen :(