[HN Gopher] Violence-as-a-Service: Brickings, Firebombings and S...
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Violence-as-a-Service: Brickings, Firebombings and Shootings for
Hire
Author : feross
Score : 116 points
Date : 2022-09-05 18:02 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (krebsonsecurity.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (krebsonsecurity.com)
| steve76 wrote:
| barrysteve wrote:
| Roald Dahl had a similar idea in the 80s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vengeance_is_Mine_Inc.
|
| The plan is simple: Pantaloon is always at the Penguin Club, so
| they'll show up and ask for him to come out. George will punch
| him and then escape in the rented 1934 Chevrolet the narrator has
| waiting.
| yardie wrote:
| Also featured in Westworld, the RICO app [0], an Uber for
| criming.
|
| [0] https://westworld.fandom.com/wiki/RICO
| yodon wrote:
| "The future is already here, it's just not very evenly
| distributed" - William Gibson
| tempxyz wrote:
| Shut this down?
| [deleted]
| nine_k wrote:
| Another reminder that our timeline is following almost every
| prediction of cyberpunk.
|
| Time to revisit some other predictions of it.
| googlryas wrote:
| I'm guessing the pay for violence as a service isn't very good,
| since McGovern-Allen now has a public defender as his lawyer.
| guywithahat wrote:
| When I read this I was assuming there would be some complex
| darkweb site used to organize this but nope, they did it on
| discord and telegram. This almost sounds more like idiots being
| idiots then any kind of organized threat
| watwut wrote:
| A lot of organized crime is idiots. Aggressive ones etc, but
| smarts is not exactly the defining feature.
|
| Smart ones gets into business and commit well hidden frauds
| rather then violence (which tends to attract attention,
| eventually).
| layer8 wrote:
| It's to be expected that we hear more about the idiots who get
| caught.
| throwaway787544 wrote:
| Most of them are total morons. Imagine the average genius that
| sticks up a liquor store, but have them go on random chat rooms
| asking how they can learn to sim swap.
| jotm wrote:
| Why not, drugs are easier to buy on Instagram for the average
| person. Even though AlphaBay is very easy to access, it's still
| not that easy. Everyone has an Insta account.
|
| Now, hiding their identities... yeah, some improvements can be
| made
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Yeah back before weed was legal in enough states for me to
| not feel travel limited Insta was the way to find a plug in a
| new town.
|
| They'd often sidechat you onto kik or something like that but
| initial find was on insta.
|
| If I can navigate it the 20 year olds sure can.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Alternatively, organizing crime on discord and telegram is hard
| enough to detect, monitor, and squash, and provides enough
| improvement to outcomes and profits, that it's shining a light
| on how incompetent our law enforcement actually is at policing
| this kind of organization, and that more sophisticated
| technologies like Tor and crypto oriented dark net markets
| aren't strictly necessary.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Tor and crypto are sophisticated but they don't actually
| provide that much extra protection to criminals - as can be
| seen by the Silk Road prosecution. All Tor does is change
| where the weakest link in your opsec is.
| sealeck wrote:
| Tor provides good traffic obsfucation for both host and
| clients. I would say it's invaluable to criminals.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Telegram I can understand, but discord is a centralized
| platform that doesn't encrypt your messages. I'm astounded
| the authorities don't have a direct ability to just search
| their database at this point.
| anonporridge wrote:
| I'm sure they do, but the shear amount of data surely must
| make it incredibly difficult to accurately detect.
|
| And worse, being a platform for gamers, the conversation of
| real world criminals might be very difficult to
| differentiate from regular gamer talk. Just think how many
| groups are constantly chatting about GTA V. They're
| literally talking about the crimes they're committing (in
| the game world). Discord might actually be the perfect
| place for criminals to hide their conversations in plain
| sight.
| brandall10 wrote:
| How do the people interested in this type of mayhem find
| it? If it's out in the relative open, it shouldn't be
| hard to find for someone that is motivated.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > I'm sure they do, but the shear amount of data surely
| must make it incredibly difficult to accurately detect.
|
| Except once you get one person who belong to such a group
| (by any conventional means) or even have one informant,
| then you can see where they hang out on discord (and
| there won't be a million of channels to scan) and now you
| have access to a nice topology of discord use for
| organized crime.
| [deleted]
| brnt wrote:
| Telegram doesn't encrypt any more than Discord: through
| https. Telegram offers a 1:1 e2e encryption option, but few
| use it, because it does not propagate to other devices.
| bioemerl wrote:
| Never mind, I had confused telegram and signal.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > hard enough to detect, monitor, and squash, and provides
| enough improvement to outcomes and profits, that it's shining
| a light on how incompetent our law enforcement actually is at
| policing this kind of organization
|
| How many police districts use Palantir?
| sealeck wrote:
| Too many.
| Schroedingersat wrote:
| Don't worry. We'll have an overzealous AI enforcer that
| deletes everything you have on the cloud and blocks access to
| basic human services on a false positive soon enough.
| squarefoot wrote:
| The ones organized on the dark web probably are those we don't
| hear about.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Something's still organised enough to be a threat if it works.
| avodonosov wrote:
| While the cases in the article use discord/telegram, it does
| not mean the dark web does not have this. And I am sure it will
| have in the future. Ananymous communication and payment tech
| create a possibility for such market. And the possibility
| combined with demand will inevitably turn into reality.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| I was hoping for something like the crime app from season 3 of
| Westworld.
| davedx wrote:
| Yeah, it's not "as-a-service"
| whateveracct wrote:
| Do you realize the word "service" has a meaning beyond "web
| service"?
| Animats wrote:
| It's New Jersey, home of organized criminals who can't make it
| in New York City.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| Back in my day you'd just pay the neighborhood troublemaker to
| slash your ex's tires. My oh my how times have changed!
| tenpies wrote:
| In the present day, the target just gets fatally run over.
|
| It won't even make headlines in most cities. And even if the
| assassin is caught, the "penalty" is a slap in the wrist in
| most Western cities, and even less in most Eastern cities.
|
| Extremely discrete, plausible deniability, and no one bats an
| eye.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Actually a good thing. This is the gig-economy version of the
| police.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Like so many of today's technical innovations, this is something
| that has existed for more than a century.
|
| Except now it's "but on the internet!"
| Eleison23 wrote:
| At first I thought this was the perpetration of remotely turning
| devices into bricks by garbling firmware, but apparently, actual
| bricks and broken windows are involved.
| userbinator wrote:
| I would not be surprised if the former also becomes commonplace
| in the future, given how much unfortunate reliance most people
| have on "smart" devices and Internet communication for their
| lives.
| acheron wrote:
| Dirty deeds, done dirt cheap
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Nice startup idea for the criminal/illegal scene. Ok, we all know
| that these activities are illegal and shouldn't be discussed, but
| for sure there is a market for such things. I can imagine a VaaS
| page like a combined eBay/Craigslist format.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| What I want to know is what makes a SIM swapper angry enough to
| do this to his "rival"? Is there some kind of online turf these
| guys are fighting over? Or is it just personal dislike/escalating
| online feud over nonsense?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Humans can be volatile, petty, vengeful, etc over
| perceived/actual transgression.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Sadly, people have been killed over parking spaces.
|
| The amount of anger and violence can be wildly out of
| proportion to the actual offense.
| Teever wrote:
| I was recently derided on hacker news for suggesting that we are
| quickly coming to a time when people will react to police
| brutality by crowd sourcing drone strikes on the offending
| officers.
|
| It will be fascinating to see how law enforcement deals with
| this.
| Msw242 wrote:
| Nah, going after the police is a death wish for all but the
| biggest baddies
|
| As enforcement gets more lax (criminal justice reform,
| progressive prosecutors, etc), victims and their families will
| start to turn to these tools to buy retribution.
|
| But mercenaries won't go after electeds. Those killers will
| need to be more bought in, e.g. gang members, cartel militias,
| etc, with enough power to completely overwhelm govt aligned
| gangs (like the police)
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(page generated 2022-09-05 23:01 UTC)