Ransomware attack reveals bitcoin as an accessory to cybercrime: Don Pittis

Many good things can be turned to evil uses.

While the anonymous electronic currency bitcoinmay have found its first supportin the broad communityof digital libertarians, the digital payment system hasrevealed itself as a dangerous tool of criminal oppression.

That has not been good for the cryptocurrency's value.

In a world where big governmentand giant corporations seem to have an unshakable grip on our lives, thelibertarian sentiment thatfavours anonymity has attracted a justifiably wide following, especially amongthe high-tech crowd.

But the latest attack by the ransomware program WannaCry, which freezes the victim'scomputer and threatens to wipe out the data it contains, has been a high-profile demonstration that bitcoin has a dark side.

That is because the substantial ransom demanded by the malwaremust be paid to the cybercriminals in bitcoins.

No counterculture cheers

Bitcoinhas suddenly overtaken the ignominious role in public perceptionformerly held by a suitcase full of unmarked currency in small denominations left in a secret location.

Perhaps if the attack had been on The Man on some sort of oppressive corporation or secretive government body WannaCry would have attracted the counterculture cheers that WikiLeaks has garnered for revealing tax cheats and political hypocrites.

Cyberduffers using old software were a soft target. Targetingthem was the work not of Robin Hood but of cyberbullies.

The most oppressive corporations and government departments are the well funded ones best equipped to deal with cyberattacks. In fact, the National Security Agency, a traditional hate object of cyber-libertarians, appears to have invented key parts of the system used in the ransomware attack.

Victimizing the poorand sick

Some of the victims have been larger corporations. But to date the most prominent casualtyis Britain's strappedNational Health Service, and the majority of peoplewho have been hurt are by no means rich oppressors.

So far there are no reports of deaths specifically attributed to the attack, but certainly the people who will suffer the most from damage in the attack on the NHS are the poorer and sicker, not the rich, who in the British system can use money to bypasspublic health wait times.

Bitcoinuses something called blockchain technology to create two sets of data, onesecret and onepublic. The public information provides a record of the encrypted data that proves each unit of the currencyis real and valuable, but owners of those encrypted currency units can remainanonymous.

That makes studying who is using thecryptocurrencydifficult. But techniques discussed in a book released last week called Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Areoffera partial route around that anonymity.

Using methods he says are similar to those described in the book, University of Kentucky economist Aaron Yelowitzdiscovered some revealing information about the thinking of people with an interest in bitcoin.

Criminals, not libertarians

Mining Googlesearch data, he tested the thesis that people were using bitcoinonpolitical principle. To oversimplify,he looked for datathat showed bitcoininformation was being searched because the searchers werelibertarians.

"We found that did not matter at all," says Yelowitz.

Instead, he found one other verystrong correlationwith illegal activity.

"Google will spit out how much interest there is state-by-state and [we] related that to interest in bitcoin, and what we found was that interest in this illegal activity absolutely did explain quite a bit of the interest in bitcoin," says Yelowitz.

Enabling crime

Effectively,Yelowitz says,bitcoin has become anenablerof illegal activity such as theransomwareattack.

"If you didn't have bitcoin all you could do is ruin people's files," he says. "What's interesting about this ransomware is that unless you had something like bitcoina way to profit from it without it being traced this ransomware stuff would be hard to do."

Bitcoinhas been an amazing invention, creating reliable value-in-exchange from bits and bytes.Last week its valuesoared to record highs, putting the value of bitcoins in circulation at about $25 billion US.

But since the ransomware attack, the cryptocurrency has seen a sharp fall.

Yelowitz says thateven if the world's governments wanted to get rid of the currency, it would not be easy. Some would like to try.

The latestransomware attack will only arm bitcoin's critics.

Then of courseif the huge publicity over the attacks means the cryptocurrencybecomes indelibly associated with criminalsand suffering, the sign "Bitcoin Accepted Here"could well lose its trendycommercial appeal.

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