Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager

jjoebuckwilliams about 5 hours ago 32 commentsRead Article on theregister.com

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Discussion (32 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

stephbook•about 3 hours ago

The article is unclear: Do they "attack" the GenX managers and encrypt their stuff, or do they simply contact GenX managers in order to get paid faster?

In that case, the managers aren't "victims" and aren't "attacked", that would be the company..

freehorse•about 3 hours ago

If the article was written by an actual human, we may have had the answer. Instead, we got this non-sense

> By the time the ransom note lands, the crooks may already know who approves invoices, who signs contracts, who runs HR, and who reports to whom. The encryption is just the bit that victims notice.

burnte•about 1 hour ago

I'm unclear what part of that sentence you didn't like, it was quite well formed. It's pointing out that the attackers do homework in advance and understand the victim company they target. It's illustrating the asymmetric information aspect of the attack, it's targeted with a lot of pre-work rather than a random victim.

neilv•about 3 hours ago

> Zscaler says they combine information from compromised systems with publicly available data to map reporting lines and identify the employees most likely to influence a company's response.

And commercially-available data: enterprise salespeople, for example, can buy this intel from data brokers (directly, or with layered services catering to sales funnels specifically).

It's another way that surveillance capitalism can be a national security threat against the US. You have countless US companies collectively mapping out people networks and assembling often intimate dossiers on individuals... and saving international organized crime and geopolitical adversaries a ton of work, which they might not have the resources to otherwise do.

SoftTalker•about 3 hours ago

They've learned from how real businesses operate. Ever talked to a salesperson? Notice how much the initial conversation is geared to trying to figure out whether you have any real purchasing authority, and who does if it isn't you?

selestify•about 1 hour ago

I have never talked to sales. How do they find this out smoothly, without insulting the person being talked to for not having any actual authority?

SoftTalker•32 minutes ago

They pretty much just ask. "If there's an opportunity here, who makes the decision?" And they'll want to know if there's a technical decision maker and a financial one.

calgoo•about 3 hours ago

So why is this only a threat to US companies and not for businesses in other parts of the world?

Nasrudith•about 2 hours ago

US consumers are more valuable which makes their data more valuable and therefore collected. It applies to other first world nations without robust enough data protections.

Lucasoato•about 3 hours ago

Companies hope that training will protect them from cyber threats, while ignoring that their most vulnerable employees are the ones that lost the motivation to care about their job.

calgoo•about 3 hours ago

Training is basically just for legal and insurance reasons... If not there would be no reason to do yearly training of the same bs courses.

theseanz•about 4 hours ago

Hey! As a 46 year old I am offended by this - I am definitely not Gen X. We’re a weird X/Millenial hybrid I’ve seen referred to as Xennials.

Also F ZScaler - we use this officially sanctioned MTM attack at work and all it does is make my job harder.

rf15•about 3 hours ago

Impressive how many people posting here love the gen [XYZ] categories and feel offended when they are not put in the correctly labeled drawer. ...Shouldn't we move on from this and obsess about something more fun?

cannonpr•about 2 hours ago

The label unless you grew up in the Anglo sphere is also especially meaningless, yet certain people insist in labelling the rest of us :) I got to enjoy Phreaking well into the era most others already had ADSL…

zetsurin•about 3 hours ago

you were born in 1980 you are gen x https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_X by definition.

QuantumNomad_•about 3 hours ago

But also:

> Xennials, also called Xillenials, are a social cohort encompassing people born on the cusp of or during the later years of Generation X and the early years of the Millennials generation.

> Many researchers and popular media use birth years from 1977 to 1983, though some extend this further in either direction. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

radarsat1•about 2 hours ago

> Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

Pretty bang on description actually. As a 46 yo, sometimes I can't believe I have actual memories of using a rotary phone, or when my family first got a microwave or even VHS recorder. Yet I do. Feels like eons ago.

hdgvhicv•about 3 hours ago

Depends a lot on your background. I was online in 1994 as a kid, but my peers weren’t until nearer 1999. Same age. We all got mobile phones when we went to university in sep 2000

blueflow•about 2 hours ago

Can't be really strict with the dates, the generation thing is cultural and depends on the time and environment of your socialisation.

mikeocool•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, by most definitions at least 50% of “40-somethings” are solidly millennial.

foco_tubi•about 1 hour ago

I am definitely more triggered by the mention of ZScaler than the Gen X scope creep

croisillon•about 3 hours ago

ngl as a 45 y.o. Gen Y i was not so surprised to read what stupid things 46 y.o. Gen X do

SoftTalker•about 4 hours ago

People on the borderlines often are overlooked. I'm an old GenX, a few years too young to be a Boomer, and even the younger Boomers grew up with a quite different experience than the mainline Boomer generation. And I was already an adult and married by the main part of the GenX era.

ourmandave•about 3 hours ago

Dividing generations across decades might work for marketing to them in general, but it's otherwise about as useful as horoscopes and the BMI scale.

saalweachter•about 3 hours ago

Duodecades are superior to decades, and we can take overlapping pairs of duodecades as "generations" to solve the dividing line problem.

Duodecades:

  * 1968-1980
  * 1980-1992
  * 1992-2004
  * 2004-2016
  * 2016-2028

Overlapping generations:

  * GenX: 1968-1992
  * Millennial: 1980-2004
  * GenZ: 1992-2016

hdgvhicv•about 2 hours ago

Precise boundaries are clearly problematic but you can’t claim that someone born in the late 60s had the same type of global view that someone born in the late 80s did.

fryanyway_swe•about 2 hours ago

The BMI scale is useful. Yes, athletes and bodybuilders it may not be accurate for, but being on HN I think you are neither :)

Currently, I am at 20 BMI, for reference.

aaronbrethorst•about 2 hours ago

You might be Generation Jones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Jones

SoftTalker•35 minutes ago

I'm slightly younger than that, but certainly shared parts of their experiences. Closer to Jones than Boomer for sure. And my father was too young for WWII and too old for Vietnam so I have no direct ties to either of those experiences.

j45•about 3 hours ago

I believe the term is xennial: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials

Rare and intersectionally have an unfair advantage.