Secrets of a ransomware negotiator

But what if there was a way around this? At the risk of mixing movie franchises, what if there was someone you could call? (I had gone with the Ghostbusters theme in an early edit, bear with me). A theoretical “Mr. Wolf Inc” who come to the rescue of people who have been hacked in the first few hours/day when the situation is frantic.

Technology, however, is creating trust between the unlikeliest of characters, even in the nefarious world of the “Darknet” – an encrypted network of secret websites that allows the exchange of illegal assets such as drugs, stolen financial data, and firearms (Reiff, 2020). The great oxymoron is that it is populated by hundreds of thousands of vendo... See more

Privacy and security in this world mostly means “which private company do you trust with your safety?” The answer often coincides with who has the largest walls and deepest moats.

What happened next, in retrospect, seems faintly incredible. With no one left to argue with him, Sam threw the switch and let Modelbot rip. “We turned it on and it instantly started making us lots of money,” said Nishad. And then they finally found the $4 million worth of missing Ripple. First they figured out its travel itinerary: it had been sent

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In traditional finance, founded on principles of trust, no one really had to trust anyone. In crypto finance, founded on a principle of mistrust, people trusted total strangers with vast sums of money. The situation was less than ideal—and just how much less than ideal became clear to Zane Tackett in August of 2016. That month, the exchange he was

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In the future, the Other Internet also believes we won’t necessarily interact with money as individuals but as collective “wealth squads.” They talk about how fractionalization can create opportunities and group resilience that would previously have been impossible to achieve alone.

Sam filled in one piece of this particular puzzle: FTX had lost a lot of money to hackers. To avoid encouraging other hackers, they’d kept their losses quiet. The biggest hacks occurred in March and April 2021. A lone trader had opened an account on FTX and cornered the market in two thinly traded tokens, BitMax and MobileCoin. His purchases drove

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