Why would you question this?
This isn’t like a drug money seizure. They’re returning assets to identified victims.
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So they’ve returned it?
More than one news report says the money was returned. I don’t see any reports on how/when the money was / is being returned. I’d guess there could be a little bit of paper work involved though and probably not instant so no suprise if it wasn’t immediate.
Honestly I think its something everyone takes for granted for good reason.
Would it be time to somehow enact a tax on ransom payments? To discourage something, it needs to be taxed, yes? Or is that out of fashion these days. 
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Tax those paying the ransom? Because receiving a ransom already is taxable income.
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These paying. I somehow doubt these receiving the payments are the law abiding type.
Could use it to fund investigation and recovery activities.
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Clearly the ones receiving ransoms will not pay. First because of different tax jurisdiction and secondly because it’d be hard to justify the source of income without running into trouble I imagine. I doubt they would ask the ones paying a ransom for 1099-MISC forms.
For the companies paying the ransom, if anything, they would more likely qualify for a deduction as a business expense. Which is why the idea was floated to make paying a ransom illegal in which case penalties would likely be specified for those actually paying ransoms anyway.
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I think the more interesting development is what Biden told Putin at the summit about hosting this hacking. My hope is something along the lines of ‘we know people that can do the same or worse, and have better ways to hide the origins than you do. Keep it up and you’re going to find out really soon.’
Otherwise if Putin wants to keep looking the other way (most likely since Western disruption is his main goal) we’re headed for a hacking Cold War, if we’re not already there now.
I’m sure the Russians are well aware of what at least some of we can do. We showed some of our cards 11 years ago : Stuxnet - Wikipedia
OTOH its unclear how much the Russians and Chinese and to lesser extent N. Korean state sponsored hackers are a legit threat to our national security.
It’s only unclear as to the “worst” they can do. In addition to scripta’s links, here is a recent article on utility hacking and the lack of utility hack reporting.
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Yes thats what I was meaning.
The potential harm that could be caused is alarming. But most of the hacks I’ve seen and heard of really amount to just hacking into poorly secured servers / systems. Hopefully this is helping us by setting off alarms on our side that we really need to improve security at every level.
Stealing data on people is mostly criminal activity towards identity theft.
Hackers meddling with water supplies is frightening for sure. BUT it seems thats mostly due to a plumber using ‘password’ for his password for the remote access to the water facility. that kind of attack is probably also mostly criminally related activity likely aimed at a ransomware kind of attack. If state sponsored hackors were behind it they wouldn’t be showing their cards unless its just meant as a unsuble threat / warning that we dont’ have the context for.
Looking at what went on with stuxnet and knowing what we can do makes me wonder if our enemies could do similar or worse. That kind of capability and the implications it could have is much much more more scary to me
Stuxnet was long ago and the techniques used were copied by criminals all the way back in 2012.
I’m sure the major actors might have acquired similar capabilities by now. Feds are aware, this is why their systems have usb ports hot glued.
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Yes Stuxnet is old news of course.
I’m not citing it for the specific techonology exploits it used. But as an example of the level of the attack and level of exploits and level of organization and coordination and the level of eventual impact.
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