None of us love terrorists. A few of us study and admire warfare and revolutionary spirit and history and daring battles, but that doesn't match actual facts on the ground. War is 1% heroism and 99% death, destruction, scorched earth for causes nobody can remember. Terrorists are 100% ruthless killers that will stop at nothing.
This however does not mean that we as a society should change our lives to suit the agenda of the terrorist. The theory of terrorism clearly aims to achieve maximum media blitz, because the terrorist wishes to recruit at home. More blitz, more willing immatures to the cause.
If you are reporting on terrorism, as I am today, you are part of the problem not the solution. Slice the lifeline of international media attention, kill the thrill. Cut the media buzz, there will be no global endorsement of the worthiness of the terrorist's pathetic message.
No worthy cause, no local hillbilly to take up arms.
The response of an intelligent society is to suppress that media blitz and get on with our life.
In particular I refer to the Londoners in 7/7 who walked home. Without fuss. Without complaint. Without media demands for war, vengance, invasion of some random country. Without caring that nobody much remembers that day.
I was in London that day, due to meet someone near Tavistock square. But I slept in.
Which was how it was: we did not respond.
Londoners have their memories. Many died. But we did not respond. The English have seen it all before and no amount of terrorism was going to cause a response from the people. Much the same all across the continent, Europeans understand the balance - it's a police business, and for the rest of us, we do not respond.
First day I was in Madrid back in 1991 or so, there were three ETA bombings. I saw the smoke from my 4 star hotel window and wondered. The Spanish have seen it all and they did not respond.
I do not refer to the British authorities who bought into the whole USA control-by-fear-of-terrorism agenda. It was you that the Brexiters voted against. And, for all the controls, costs, spying, economic exclusion, false positives, what do you have to show?
I was at the infamous JFK airport terrorist incident in New York, in the height of terromania in USA. In our thousands, we ran out of terminals onto the tarmac and camped under planes. To panicked people, I explained why we were totally safe - "no they can't shoot us because we just run further out to the airfield." Stay here, and do not respond. You are safe.
The Kenyan people aren't going to be effected by the Dusit attack. Nairobi as a people weren't effected by the Westgate attack, that I saw, and I was there in Nairobi at the time.
The Kenyans did not respond.
Not because Kenyans are insensitive or dumb or unaware. To the contrary - what Kenyans were effected by was political disaster of 2007, in which 2000 or more people died. Kenyas were marked by 2007, deeply. If there is anything that Kenyans remember of Westgate, it was the political backstory of Westgate - the army's response. The cynicism runs deep in Kenya, and it seems that the army did not shoot the police in this new Dusit event. Progress.
Do not respond.
The smarter society analyses the risks. Nairobi is a city of 3 million people or so, which means about 100 die on a given day. The people of Nairobi, and any large city, can only be effected by much larger numbers dying, OR by mainstream media spruiking a panic.
The smarter society does not respond to mainstream media.
Authorities everywhere would be smart to recognise that the agenda of fear only goes so far before they create their own revolution.
We, society are watching. Don't make us respond, because we will respond to something closer to the truth than you want.
7 years after we called the cancer that is criminal activity in Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies, here comes a report that suggests that 4.3% of Monero mining is siphoned off by criminals.
A First Look at the Crypto-Mining Malware
Ecosystem: A Decade of Unrestricted Wealth
Sergio Pastrana
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid*
spastran@inf.uc3m.esGuillermo Suarez-Tangil
King’s College London
guillermo.suarez-tangil@kcl.ac.ukAbstract—Illicit crypto-mining leverages resources stolen from victims to mine cryptocurrencies on behalf of criminals. While recent works have analyzed one side of this threat, i.e.: web-browser cryptojacking, only white papers and commercial reports have partially covered binary-based crypto-mining malware. In this paper, we conduct the largest measurement of crypto-mining malware to date, analyzing approximately 4.4 million malware samples (1 million malicious miners), over a period of twelve years from 2007 to 2018. Our analysis pipeline applies both static and dynamic analysis to extract information from the samples, such as wallet identifiers and mining pools. Together with OSINT data, this information is used to group samples into campaigns.We then analyze publicly-available payments sent to the wallets from mining-pools as a reward for mining, and estimate profits for the different campaigns.Our profit analysis reveals campaigns with multimillion earnings, associating over 4.3% of Monero with illicit mining. We analyze the infrastructure related with the different campaigns,showing that a high proportion of this ecosystem is supported by underground economies such as Pay-Per-Install services. We also uncover novel techniques that allow criminals to run successful campaigns.
This is not the first time we've seen confirmation of the basic thesis in the paper Bitcoin & Gresham's Law - the economic inevitability of Collapse. Anecdotal accounts suggest that in the period of late 2011 and into 2012 there was a lot of criminal mining.
Our thesis was that criminal mining begets more, and eventually pushes out the honest business, of all form from mining to trade.
Testing the model: Mining is owned by BotnetsLet us examine the various points along an axis from honest to stolen mining: 0% botnet mining to 100% saturation. Firstly, at 0% of botnet penetration, the market operates as described above, profitably and honestly. Everyone is happy.
But at 0%, there exists an opportunity for near-free money. Following this opportunity, one operator enters the market by turning his botnet to mining. Let us assume that the operator is a smart and careful crook, and therefore sets his mining limit at some non-damaging minimum value such as 1% of total mining opportunity. At this trivial level of penetration, the botnet operator makes money safely and happily, and the rest of the Bitcoin economy will likely not notice.
However we can also predict with confidence that the market for botnets is competitive. As there is free entry in mining, an effective cartel of botnets is unlikely. Hence, another operator can and will enter the market. If a penetration level of 1% is non-damaging, 2% is only slightly less so, and probably nearly as profitable for the both of them as for one alone.
And, this remains the case for the third botnet, the fourth and more, because entry into the mining business is free, and there is no effective limit on dishonesty. Indeed, botnets are increasingly based on standard off-the-shelf software, so what is available to one operator is likely visible and available to them all.
What stopped it from happening in 2012 and onwards? Consensus is that ASICs killed the botnets. Because serious mining firms moved to using large custom rigs of ASICS, and as these were so much more powerful than any home computer, they effectively knocked the criminal botnets out of the market. Which the new paper acknowledged:
... due to the proliferation of ASIC mining, which uses dedicated hardware, mining Bitcoin with desktop computers is no longer profitable, and thus criminals’ attention has shifted to other cryptocurrencies.
Why is botnet mining back with Monero? Presumably because Monero uses an ASIC-resistant algorithm that is best served by GPUs. And is also a heavy privacy coin, which works nicely for honest people with privacy problems but also works well to hide criminal gains.