Ransomware Is Growing Three Times Faster Than the Spending Meant to Stop It

The idea that the spending needs to grow linearly with the growth is a damning indictment of the mindset of the vast ineffectual mess that is the cybersecurity industry.

It seems obvious to me that the only real solution is to penalize the payment of ransoms. For the same reasons one doesn't negotiate with terrorists.

Is there some reason to believe that this isn't the best approach? And if not, then any theories as to why it hasn't been enacted?

I don't think there is a reasonable correlation, since stopping ransomware doesn't require that much of an increase in spending; it's a culture thing more than a money thing.

Stopping Ransomware is trivial if governments knew where the money goes. But cryptocurrencies and lax capital control pushed by the uber-rich makes it impossible.

The technology is there and it is used to track the average citizens every move. But when it comes to rich people then the money goes and comes without control (and without taxation).

Cryptocurrencies are a great solution to enable criminal activity. Their only use and highly appreciated by terrorists, criminals and dictatorial governments around the world.

If ransomware spending must scale directly with ransomware attacks then I don't see how companies could possibly keep up with the spending. A lot of the "gaps" in cybersecurity are essentially spending problems. Companies want to spend as little on it as they can.

The davos oracle https://youtube.com/shorts/Pqig_vIR4zI?si=G_JpJP90xqO0AQAd

I wonder what kinds of market hypotheses you could derive from the game theory here

Wait until companies try powering their businesses with agentic systems. Then businesses aren't paying a ransom to prevent privacy law lawsuits, but rather they'll be paying a ransom equivalent to the black market value of their business.

I think this article mostly shows that publicly announcing a successful ransoming of a company is now more popular than a couple years back.

Thanks, Satoshi

Well, given that C levels see cybersecurity has a bad return on investment (read: insurance), Ive seen countless numbers of people laid off these jobs.

So yeah, I'm surprised its only 3x, and not even more.

A good abliterated local LLM is great at finding dumb exploits and writing ransomware code. And the cybersec professionals? Yeah, theyre pivoting elsewhere and gone.