Bitcoin Forum

North Korea has been blamed publicly.
But anybody can imitate North Korea's technology and make it look like they are guilty.

Ripple is basically a digital government currency. It has some mysterious extremely deep pocket behind it and is very friendly to regulators.

Government regulators who do not want to see fiat go, who want to keep their comfortable jobs, are gloating over the attack. It's silk road 2.0. The virus seems to have been programmed to geo avoid certain countries, which may be a remnant of the initial code, or a quirk of the attacker.

Other financial sectors have a history of using dirty tricks to gain a small benefit. This attack would have been low cost, low risk, high benefit to some.

Worth noting too that the virus did not spread through easily noticeable vectors. The attack itself seems to have been done by somebody who would have had to be familiar with the pre release i.e., pre hack, use of the code. In other words it was not something anybody could just copy and release. It seems to have relied on Windows vulnerabilities that are not useful to routine hackers.

I guess govt is behind this attacks and many more to come in future
It just want to bring some kind of regulation/ban on bitcoin and other cryptocurrency ..citing the attacks and ransom

No one actually wins in this attack, it shows that bitcoin can indeed be anonymous, but it also shows how hard it is for newbies to actually pay using bitcoins, and also establish bitcoin with a bad reputation as a hacker currency.

At the end everyone with evil intentions are the losers parties, if you wrong someone it doesn't matter how, what matters is your intend, I seriously can't understand politics but the so called attack wasn't that big to pay this much attention to it.

If you run for president I will vote for you.

Many people said is a win win situation for bitcoin and others crypto currencies like ripple but to me this is a sign for government to start clams down bitcoin and crypto currencies in general. "indeed bitcoin is anonymous" and because of its nature of anonymous many hackers will now going to hack more and this will create fear in the heart of bitcoin heavy investment.

What's missing are opinions from individuals who are not interested in somebody deciding which currency they should use.

The assumption of corporate/government currencies like Ripple is that people should be made to use a currency with an 'acceptable' amount of traceability, which is fine. Most people want to have some proof of payments they made etc.

But there are lots of currencies that can solve the problem without govt help, and even bitcoin could evolve in a way that limits its usefulness to extort money.

The problem, for most people in the world, is not anonymity, it is government control of their money. Most of the dictators in history would not have existed if they did not control money, and as long as a group of dangerous people can hide in government and control currency 'for the benefit of whomever', governments will not move forward.

 

What has Ripple got to do with this. Ripple is not even a real cryptocurrency. No one is the big winner here, in fact the originators of the attack will be the losers in the end as people will become more aware after this attack and will back up their files a lot more regularly. If they create a new Ransomware it will not be effective as very very few people will accept to pay the ransom, the others will gladly format their PC and reinstall their OS and then transfer the backup files. In the end no one is the winner.

Yeah I agree with you. Ripple what? In the end the hackers will lose in this. People now are going to safeguard their crypto's so that they will not be a victim of another kind of malware like Wannacry. Of course, they will evolve, to find new exploits, but people now will learn how to backup their files everyday or even make their wallet safe. And as far as media attention is concern, I think its a good exposure to bitcoin technology. People will search what bitcoin is and why the hackers want it as mode of payment.

The extortionists received a ransom of more than $ 12,000. They are already winners. To reserve a database is of little use, because no one knows how long after penetration of the virus begins to work. He may sit inside your backups. Extortionists demanded payment in bitcoins and this means that once again touted the cryptocurrency. The whole world is talking not only about the virus, but the bitcoin is good.

Wherever and whatever the hackers do and evolve, people are not stupid to put the backups of their files and their wallets in the same OS they do their daily work. Me and everyone else will keep our backup of wallets in an external USB or HDD and will use as needed,(normally I don't need this as I have proactive protection of Avira Full Internet Security Suite but just in case). This way if you backup your files daily no hacker or ransomware can harm you. Maximum of harm they can do to you is a few hours of work, to reinstall OS and transfer files.

Where can you vote that your 16 year old brother did the attack?

not me !


Why not sister? :).

well it was the largest scale cyber attack in the history -or so they called it
and when there is a ransom in bitcoins it definitely puts bitcoins in the limelights,even if in the negative
but as some people say there is no such a thing as BAD publicity
maybe it is one of the steps that helps the adoption,who knows:you hear about it on the news,then you  look up bitcoin on the web and get hooked ")
so all in all I think bitcoin is the big winner

Added since it is a possibility.

I am sure that people will not every day to spend several hours to transfer files. Everything will remain as it is. I don't really trust antivirus programs. They spread the viruses to stimulate the purchase of antivirus. Kaspersky lab is working for the FSB and who knows what viruses it spreads.

It's hard to tell, because we don't know who hides under these attacks. I don't believe this attack was made by North Korea. I don't think that their hackers is such powerful to make attack which affected people in over 100 countries.
My personal conspiracy theory:  maybe attack was made by group of people who are working in big IT corporation and they found security breach and found way how to benefit from it. So, I think these who made this attack is only winners in this situation.

Not necessarily "people who are working in big IT corporation", but clearly not some little hacker trying to get bitcoin.

The mechanism that caused the malware to spread outside the networks it was in is not known by a lot of people yet.

Most likely it involves a flaw built into Windows and meant exclusively for the use of government agencies. There is additional public information that points to this, though it is not discussed much. The hacker was most likely an employee of some government who was aware of how to trigger these hidden Windows modules, though he/she could well have been from any govt as the existence of this is somewhat known and is described in a roundabout way on public sites.

Then a person should ask "What was the goal of making such a false front attack"?

Today we see a much bigger attack based on the same malware, used to "mine Monero". The timing, and the fact that the new malware is less hostile to the public, suggests a possible motive.

 

It seems to me that under the pretext of extortion hidden much more global purpose. We think that the goal of hackers is money, but I think it's training for war. Imagine what would happen if the enemy at one point denied all of the computers. I think for this virus are entire laboratory, rather than individual hackers.

I chose the 16 year-old. Wait, that don't sound right.  ;D

But seriously, though it's possible this is another front of cyber warfare, I still think it's likely some hacker or a group of hacker out to make some quick bucks. Just recently someone was holding Pirates of the Caribbean sequel hostage. Never underestimate personal motivation.

The way I understood what happened, the US gov't found some vulnerability in Windows but did not report it to Microsoft since they probably found a use for it (hence the stinging denouncement from the company). A hacker group later released some sort of leak. Is this one of those?

Microsoft is way more hacked than that. There are common programs that a lot of people use which cause Windows to download ... etc. The NSA knows that its hacking tools will be public eventually, they may be intrusive but they are not retarded. The tools cannot be used unless you have access to some things that mostly only governments can access, i.e., through Microsoft. The NSA tried to put the blame on Microsoft but Microsoft does as told. Now Microsoft has to pretend it made a mistake that allowed vast vulnerabilities and it makes patches not to fix anything but to give the appearance.

You think this is some sort of inside job then? Maybe a Microsoft employee doing a bit of hacking on the side?

Microsoft employees probably did not have access to everything needed to use the malware. Possible, not likely.

some say it was an attack on bitcoin,there is a conspiracy theory on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/6c3n6j/wannacry_ransomware_exposed_as_a_false_flag_to/
if you watch that video,the author is trying to prove that it was a false falg operation to tarnish bitcoin's reputation and try and drive the price down
this was hugely unsuccessful,we are about to hit 2000$ as we speak

If this is really a conspiracy theory then it must come from China  :D as they are the ones who used to spread FUD news and drag the price down whenever the price was about to rally big time ,but now they are not having that much control over the system and most or all of the exchanges in China disables people withdrawing the coins and so they might have come up with wannacry,who knows.  ;D

Bitcoin of course.

See the rise in value. See lots of people talking about it. See lots of people considering investing in Bitcoins.

Bitcoin is the winner, followed by alts

Agreed, bitcoin is the true winner. Due to wannacry bitcoin popularity have increased as well have reached lots of unknown users who hear the term bitcoin for the first time. Also the ongoing price increase confirm that bitcoin is the winner.

Bitcoin has reached a stage where it no longer needs the negative publicity. In the early stages, any sort of publicity (including the negative type) was good for Bitcoin. But now that is no longer the case.

I was wondering if there was really a kid that found 50 BTC during the attack and chose that option ha-ha, with all that considered the wannacry ransom was quite modest considering how many PC's it infected.

It irks me that apparently windows 7 is the most vulnerable yet the easiest to use, I see a MS conspiracy.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/19/15665488/wannacry-windows-7-version-xp-patched-victim-statistics
(Also this data does not account for all the ATM's in china that got locked I believe)

Because of sloppy coding, researchers have found that private system encryption keys can often be recovered from infected machines.
That part was new to me but the joke is that it is due to Sloppy Windows Coding ha-ha thank goodness its Windows lol.
https://github.com/aguinet/wannakey

In my opinion the attack was initiated by some government agency to test how strong and powerful the virus is, after all what's the use of making a computer virus when you can't even use it.

it was a particular vulnerability exploited,known to the agencies only
well.I haven't checked the info,but people say that it appeared on wikileaks,hence the "kid" "50 bitcoins" and
this plethora of unprofessionalism surrounding wannacry (this domain cure,no decypher keys sent etc.)
by the way it is not only windows 7 that is prone to the attack,win 7 and older all have this vulnerability

I don't know who is the big winner, but I can tell you who are the big losers: NSA, Obama, and their strategy of "backdoors".

Leave a backdoor or hide a bug, first or later somebody will find it and use for his own purposes.

It was the chart data that was included with the article that was making me question it given the news of China units running XP.
I heard that a lot of XP units crashed before the program executed so it may be plausible just not 98% of all infections plausible like Kapreseky implied.
https://twitter.com/craiu/status/865562842149392384
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DAMYyYGWAAADaD9.jpg


So based on the chart either Kaspersky is trolling us with these numbers
2. China pirates Windows 7 not Windows XP in 2017
3. The data is erroneous
https://www.hongkongfp.com/2017/05/21/china-home-half-computers-infected-wannacry-ransomware/

This seemed more like the actual

Data from BitSight covering 160,000 internet-connected computers hit by WannaCry shows that Windows 7 accounts for 67 percent of infections, although it represents less than half the global distribution of Windows PC users.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/windows-7-machines-most-impacted-by-wannacrypt-462553

So long story short I was complaining about the source and that Kapreseky was B/S should have said capable of spreading the virus perhaps not 98% of Total infections.

Anti-virus provider Kaspersky could be one of the big winners. They were among the first to detect the virus. Almost none of the Kasper-protected systems were infected by this ransomware.

are you sure? reports were saying "no antivirus was able to stop the virus"
has Kaspersky issued an update to fight this particular threat?
Kaspersky has been targeted by western media as pro-kremlin FSB sponsored company
so this could  make their image better somewhat
p.s. they have a free antivirus version with reduced functionality,wonder if it can stop Wannacry

At this point it is impossible to ban bitcoin, it would be outrageously stupid and wouldn't fix anything.

1. You can't effectively bank bitcoin, you can only hinder its legal presence, it will be just harder to exchange BTC to fiat.
2. If bitcoin won't be used as ransomware payment method something else will take its place, other more anonymous altcoin or something totally different like premium text messages or phone calls.