Ransomware: Play me the song about the blackmail trojan

In August 2011 Marc Andreessen wrote the legendary sentence "Software is eating the world".

Today, almost ten years later, it should read: "Ransomware is eating the world" - blackmail Trojans are eating up the world.

And they don't stop at anything or anyone.

The criminal business model - the perpetrators encrypt files and drives of their victims and thereby paralyze IT until a ransom is paid - is professionalized through and through and immensely successful.

As is well known, in May the oil pipeline operator Colonial and the meat manufacturer JBS were hacked and blackmailed.

A few days ago a contractor from the US government came along who does something with nuclear weapons.

One could argue that a world without oil, meat and nuclear weapons would not be so bad after all.

But at the same time, it has also hit the Irish state health system, the Washington, DC Police Department, and various other companies.

Schools and universities, courts, hospitals and private individuals are not spared either.

The IT security veteran Kevin Beaumont is certain: "We are not even close to the peak." He is not sure, however, "whether people understand the situation."

Maybe ... singing will help.

At least that's what Forrest Brazeal, a cloud computing specialist from North Carolina, thought.

So he sat down at the piano and composed the "ransomware song".

It's two minutes short, cheerful and gets to the point who is really to blame for this plague: mathematics.

After all, encryption is nothing more than applied mathematics.

And this is how Brazeal sings:

“Next time there's no meat or water or gas

And we slide a little closer to the day of wrath

You can blame IT, or some russian sociopath

But personally, I blame math. "

Admittedly, the musical genre IT security pop is perhaps not yet ripe for its own Grammy category.

But I do see a certain potential: When the "Wellerman" song hit the Internet via TikTok at the beginning of the year, the hacker Rachel Tobac adapted the seamen's song melody for her password song "Soon may a Criminal come".

Anyone who hears this and then still does not rely on two-factor authentication and a password manager can hardly be helped.

Back to ransomware: The song by Brazeal is - amusing as it may be - of course not the answer to the global plague of blackmail.

I think it has to be more comprehensive than a two-minute song or the slogan "Keep your software up to date and do backups" - even if industry experts don't necessarily agree with me.

Kevin Beaumont proposes, among other things, stricter legal regulation of crypto currencies to make them "more cumbersome for criminals" who collect their ransom in Bitcoin or Monero.

Or as Agustín Carstens from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel just told my colleagues: "Bitcoin is only good for two things - for speculating and for ransom payments."

Beaumont's other suggestions for solving the crisis contain many ifs and buts, the simpler is his description of the problem: "Ransomware is the risk that your company suffers a heart attack." That is at least as memorable as the ransomware song.

External links: three tips from other media

• "Cybersecurity: Seehofer for the use of zero-day exploits and for hackbacks" (5 reading minutes)

  
  

  The tireless Stefan Krempl from "heise online" has summarized the 128-page draft of the Federal Ministry of the Interior for a "cybersecurity strategy".

  Among other things, this contains requests for “new approaches to unencrypted access to originally encrypted communication content” - because a few state Trojans are not enough for the ministry.

• "Corporations want to test quantum computers" (3 minutes' reading)

  
  

  If quantum computers are the solution, what

  kind of

  problem would large German companies have?

  A brief overview of the »Süddeutsche Zeitung«.

• "The digital election campaign is here" (podcast, 39 minutes)

  
  

  It sounds like a visit to a strange planet: The current "broadband" program is about German politicians and parties on TikTok.

I wish you a successful week!

Patrick Beuth