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The Extortion Economy: How Insurance Companies Are Fueling a Rise in Ransomware
- bertil 7y agoThere isn’t an economic balance for ransom: if a gang ransomed someone, know that the security issue won’t be fixed in the next month, they could sell the name to another gang. Even if it’s not in the long-term interest of the gang, members might leak, voluntarily or not. This means that there will be a surge in activity but the cost will grow in ways that few insurers might expect -- Lloyds excluded, who can draw on their experience of dealing with sea piracy to model self-financing extorsion. I expect this will rapidly turn into reasonable budgets for OpSec, and enforcement by the insurer’s expert: procedural but at least not based on the dual “there was no incident lately, therefore you are useless/there was an incident lately, therefore you are useless”.