Criminal crypto

It was a long time coming, but a ransomware attack is finally the main headline in Indian newspapers. Delhi's premier AIIMS, one of the busiest hospitals in India, has now spent close to two weeks with large parts of its information systems crippled. Now that the hospital has mostly restored services without paying the ransom, there are news stories that the ransomware gang is threatening to release years of patient records on the dark web. Anecdotally, there are a lot of ransomware attacks in India except that they are generally not widely publicised.

Why do these attacks happen? The general idea is to blame some things called malware or ransomware, or more mundanely, computer viruses. How are we to save ourselves from this? Again, the general idea is that by being careful, training computer users, having firewalls, virus scanners, etc., I would say that all this is about as useful as the masks and the social distancing and the rest of it that all of us did in the case of a different kind of virus. It works for a while but you can't be 100 per cent careful for 100 per cent of the rest of your life, even granted that these measures work. Eventually, everyone gets it.

I fear it will be the same with ransomware. Unless.. unless we understand the root cause of this plague and take measures against that. And the root cause is not computer malware of any kind - the malware is just a proximate cause. The root cause is cryptocurrencies.

Computer malware has been around for maybe four decades or so. The first virus I personally experienced was the first one that was ever written - something called Brain, created by two Pakistanis in 1986. The first network malware, an 'internet worm', was released by an MIT student in 1988. Before crypto came along, malware was a manageable problem. Crypto has made it into a genuine threat for individuals and businesses.

Think about it - how would this AIIMS hack work without crypto? Anonymous money transfer from these ransom kinds of crimes were earlier possible only through cash. That was the one way that this could be done. It has to be done physically and in any kind of large amounts, it's quite cumbersome. However, now we have a way of transferring money anonymously across the world. Think about it. Here's a medium for exchange of funds, that is expressly designed to be untraceable and anonymous, and (this is the crucial part) has already proven to be a vital ingredient of the massive wave of ransomware crime that is sweeping the world. Ransomware is the most obvious but crypto is now said to be an integral part of the worldwide narcotics trade as well as other kinds of criminal enterprise.

More than a decade after it began, the only thing crypto is used for is crime, speculation and the kind of fraud that FTX has turned out to be. And oh yes, I've heard of all the wonderful things that will happen with the underlying blockchain technology but that looks more like a supposed solution looking for a problem. One day there will be some kind of a golden blockchain future but meanwhile, all of us must suffer this global crime wave enabled by cryptocurrencies.

This is not a problem that any individual or business can deal with in any reasonable way. Somehow, governments must act decisively against cryptocurrency-enabled crime. Given that crypto is tailor-made for criminal activity, it's getting harder to see how that could be done. The soft treatment that the FTX scamster is getting in the US makes me think that too many people now have a stake of some kind in the crypto racket continuing . My guess is that we will see more and more incidents like the AIIMS one and then eventually there will be one that will be so big - a major bank, for example - that there will finally be some serious thought to stamp out this monstrosity.

Suggested read: The crypto bloodbath