Something that I got the impression from the reading the fluff is that the threat of the Hassassins assassinating people is treated with some kind of gravity of permanence, but if people can just be restored from cube backups, I don't see how they actually manage to kill anyone of the kind of people they are going to target rather then it just being a form of assault rather then actual death, which kind of really undercuts their menace they are supposed to have, since according to the RPG, apparently cube backups are something common enough to commercially available, something that i thought as a new player was only something ALEPH could do, which seems to me to make more sense in terms of making the threat of Hassassins actually something threatening.
This is where the Barids come in, destroying the backup whilst the other Hassassins destroy the body and cube. Alternatively if you just need someone out of the way for a bit, killing someone who is backed up in another planet means they'll be out of action whilst the backup is put into a new Lhost and they travel back to the theatre of operations. Finally, if someone witnesses something they shouldn't, killing them before their next backup still technically kills the witness.
In the dire foes story they kill the corporate target they are after and she's rezzed up and is kind of bummed that they lost some memories, that's about it. They do destroy the cubes and backups at times though. A lot of the time it seems to be more of a media/shock thing. "Don't keep doing this or we have the means to end it."
When you say Cube back-ups, do you mean having a Cube in your head, or a Cube with a copy of you stored somewhere?
Outrage also mentions that most PanO military/Hexahedron operatives have off-site (should that be off-body?) backups of their cubes, and that it's possible for a good hacker to erase those backups. It is also possible to backup someone without a cube, but it's more expensive and takes longer to resurrect them (see Hussein Al-D'Jelibeybi).
I would imagine getting your throat slashed is not just any old an inconvenience - ecpesially since the hassassin can then totally destroy the body and cube with you
IMO, the setting would make more sense if cube backups with ALEPH exclusive thing, because even as good as Barids are; even I have a hard time believing that they could scour under every rock in the human sphere where someone could store a backup.
If we assume that cubes work pretty much like cortical stacks from Altered Carbon (which is a pretty safe bet considering that's what they're based on) then there might only be a few places in the Human Sphere with the storage, availability, and bandwidth to be capable of receiving cube backups. It'll also depend on an individual's backup plan, a Hexahedron VIP is likely to be backed up on a PanOceanian backup farm, Civilians would use consumer services (like AWS or Azure today) whilst a MagnaObra CEO might use a private MagnaObra backup system. Maybe this is why there are so many types of Hassassins, a Barid finds where the backup is stored, a Fiday infiltrates the location to let in a Muyib team to physically destroy it, whilst a Lasiq takes out the actual target and then a Farzan destroys the recovered cube before a resurrection can happen.
Also, from a more limited issue, sometimes all the Hassassins need is for their target to not be available for a time. Maybe as little as missing that one meeting. Most civilians have to pay for their Resurrection, and that is a sum it takes a lifetime of compound interest (and good investments!) to afford. The militaries of the Sphere carried Resurrection Insurance for all their troops, but how many non-government civilians actually do?
