[easterncalculus]

"The US always claims to have the best cyber-warfare capability on the planet, so presumably they could do ransomware better and faster than gangs like REvil. The US should use this capability to mount ransomware attacks against US companies as fast as they can."

This is totally ridiculous. If anything, the US government needs to hack people less, stop dropping broken DLLs[1] and focus on defense. Security needs to be built up and incentivized, not punitively broken down. Practically all of the organizations hit by these huge attacks were not doing basic measures. Many of them not by CVEs from this year as this post implies.

It also isn't even "ransomware" in this case since there's no ransom. It's just the government hacking your computer because the military-industrial complex (MITRE) doesn't like you. No hate towards them or CVE, but that's not a good look or policy.

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[1] https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2021/01/cleani...

[redler]

The article is attempting to follow in the satirical tradition of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal", which suggested feeding children to the poor in 18th century Ireland.

[f38zf5vdt]

Indeed. :) This is as much about encouraging US ransomware attacks as much as A Modest Proposal was about eating babies.

[easterncalculus]

I've read it, but I find the line hard to see with this article. There are several, maybe most, of the other claims that are actually true. Governments in general really do breach systems and drop malware like this, and most ransomware attacks aren't being performed with big zero day exploits. Jonathan Swift didn't cite his previous articles or actual newspapers, as I remember at least. After a couple more reads I should have picked up on them "shortening the grace period", that seems obvious. I got burned by this one.