I don't see why a company would pay a ransom to protect their customers from identity theft -- the losses are public, while the costs to them are a very small number of customers that read about this, think they're likely to lose the data again, didn't already lose their data in this leak, remember this story at the time of purchase, and value that more than things like ticket time or ticket price. I don't think the hackers should be making any money this way.
That's the official stance, but if it really mattered they'd pay.
And there's of course paths to pay without losing face, like hiring a negociator or a recovery firm that acts like a bridge for the money[0]. We came to accept that companies don't act ethically and will only maximize profit, yet the narrative is still stuck on that weird assumption they care about the future of society regarding ransomware.
Tragedy of the commons. It's irrelevant to the extorted company whether or not it becomes more common in the future, they have a much bigger problem now.
The reason they didn't pay is because they conducted a cost benefit analysis and decided it's not worth it to them.
> It's irrelevant to the extorted company whether or not it becomes more common in the future, they have a much bigger problem now.
No, it's not irrelevant because that future might be tomorrow. The criminals remain in possession of the data whether they get paid or not, that is, the extortion can be restarted the next day (or hour) after payment.
There's no way to trust an anonymous group you know nothing about, be it to keep their word or to keep your data safe from individual members or splintering groups.
That would be part of the cost benefit analysis. And you would be surprised how "trustworthy" these ransomware groups are. Probably because publishing the data is a hassle they would rather do without, and finding actual buyers for such data is hard (corporations don't tend to have black budgets).
No, whenever they decide not to pay it's because they made the decision to absorb the damage rather than pay criminals who may or not be sanctioned (and that fact may later emerge) creating additional liability. So you know that when they pay the damage would have been very great indeed. In this instance the damage is likely minor or more likely, off-sourced.
Nobody is not going to pay because that will be better for the collective to let the ransomware industry die. They may however choose to publicly state that as the reason.
The current groups, sure, but the existence of a functioning market tends to bring in more participants. Or to put it another way, there are plenty of smart people in the world who found themselves born in a less-than-ideal country and are willing to solve their problems through crime.
The only sustainable solution is to make crime no longer pay. Nothing else will work.
The other solution is making those “less than ideal” countries have more attractive legal economic opportunities so that crime isn’t an attractive alternative.
The only reason these persist is because companies pay out and they can receive it in untraceable crypto currency in countries that are nearly to prosecute them in.
You make it sound like a simplistic game with set rules. There will be myriads of other reasons to breach companies, and even strictly sticking to the money part, doing ransom/extortion can have secondary and tertiary effects worth enough to do it even if the ransom fails.
If you look at it as a market, the victim is only one actor among many.
I think ransom is also a bit of a misnomer that the hackers deliberately use to frame the transaction in a more positive light.
I mean, it's just extortion. Nothing is being ransomed, you don't get something back and you can't really secure something already lost. It suffers from the same problems as other forms of extortion, namely that you can't really trust the other party to do what you want and really they have no incentive to do so.
And the best part? The ransomware startup can now mark the income as MRR extending to infinity, thereby significantly increasing the startup's valuation! If you want to learn more about B2B sales, hit that like button and click on this .exe file to subscribe for more updates.
but the parent post's point still stands - extortion (or ransom) requires something important to be held. If the private data of customers is not actually important, it cannot be used as a threat in the extortion.
We have public agencies like the police that are paid for by the tax-payers for securing property. Are there similar agencies who are incentivized to stop these situations. During the pipeline breaches several years back, I recall aggressive action to disrupt the money-trail.
To the extent these situation are as illegal as property theft, public agencies tasked with law enforcement, like the police, are in the same position to secure your data as they are to secure your property, no?
It’s even more dystopian than that. In Australia itself, Qantas is the only carrier between many cities. So if you decide to not book Qantas, you’re potentially driving across the Outback.
Yes, it's a sad situation we're in. We need am indirection step in addresses. So companies don't have our actual address but instead have a handle they can use to interact with that address. And then the actual addresses should be guarded with more responsibility.
But that's just an identifier which you can easily update when you move, like a domain=>IP mapping? Businesses still have your physical address.
A system where they didn't get our address at all would be great but I think we would also need alternative payment providers that don't share any billing-related address information with the business.
> The Qantas data, which was stolen from a Salesforce database in a major cyber-attack in June, included customers’ email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and frequent flyer numbers. It did not contain credit card details, financial information or passport details.
Curious, what's the worst a bad actor do with name, email address, phone number and birth date?
Phishing. Super easy now to send a fake email with a great offer, and have your name and loyalty programme number right there in the email. Much easier to trick someone when your email contains a bunch of personal info that you wouldn’t assume others to have.
«Happy birthday! As a loyal Quantas customer, we would like to offer you a sneak peek of our upcoming Black Friday deals. Consider it a little birthday present from us.»
scam call you with further fake extortions like "I'm in jail mom you need to bail me out!" since they have birthdates they can target older people for this. my mom has received at least four of these calls, since I always get the "ARE YOU OK? WAS THAT A SCAM?" phone call afterwards. the first time it happened, they were about to go to the bank to wire money when dad said, "let's try calling his cell!"
we'd like to think these scams are stupid but unfortunately they work
To apply for a credit card in Australia, you need to supply at least two forms of ID, such as an Australian driver's license, passport, or Medicare card.
Do the banks actually check that the documents are legit? I'm sure your favorite LLM can generate pictures of all these documents in the blink of an eye.
Because they usually don't, and they certainly don't in Australia where it's essentially impossible. The government run IDMatch DVS can verify that the biographic information is correct, but can not verify the authenticity of the document.
This kind of fraud is not special in Australia, it happens thousands of times every single day. There is currently no way to prevent it.
The last time I applied for a credit card (about 4 years ago) in Australia, the bank used an app that read the photo page and chip of my passport to verify that it was a real document. That process does verify the authenticity of the document.
There are IDs in Australia which can be verified this way. There are also more than enough accepted IDs that can not, rendering such verification mechanisms rather pointless.
On another note, it's important to keep in mind that this is really the bank's problem. It's not something consumers should worry about.
Authenticate to phone banking in the name of a customer and request a personal loan. And in general, open a large line of credit in someone else's name.
This you can do somewhere? My bank asks me 20 questions (many like my first pet name, the last transaction I did etc) and then calls me back on the registered phone number. That data alone should get you nothing really. For credit here , small or large, you have to prove you are you or you get a nice police escort. Most of these apps, even if you are already registered, want you to tap your passport to nfc and scan your face for anything serious.
Surely name, email, phone and date of birth aren't enough to do this at any bank? That's not quite public info but near enough. I've filled that in on hundreds of forms during my life and it's info that any of my friends have.
> global data was stolen between April 2024 and September 2025 and includes personal and contact information of the companies’ customers and employees, including dates of birth, purchase histories and passport numbers.
they probably didnt feel that there was a threat, as privacy of their customer's data wasn't very high on their priority list - after all, they didnt secure that data very well in the first place leading to the stolen data!
This topic is always a mixed bag for me, on the one hand I don't think you should pay ransom groups as it encourages more, but also their security should be better.
> “No company wants to see, you know, hundreds of thousands, or, millions of records of their customers just on the internet,” Kirk said. “That’s awful. It’s awful for the companies. It’s awful for the people affected.”
This reads to me like : "Well yeah sorry to our customers, but we're not taking a loss for our incompetance"
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