>I'm curious if that remains true? It's complicated, like any scenario where there is individual benefit but social harm (with healthy mixes of fault and incom

>I'm curious if that remains true? It's complicated, like any scenario where there is individual benefit but social harm (with healthy mixes of fault and incompetence too). It's so obvious sometimes it can get lost, but the people behind the ransomware are criminals. Ransom paid to them is money that is in fact directly going to supporting criminals, the government and in turn taxpayers aiding them. At "best" they're very pure single type cybercriminals and it "merely" supports them in pushing more ransomware. More often criminals are into a diverse set of activities, ranging from other varieties of cybercrime to being part of a real world physical syndicate, in which case some of the ransom is going to an organization that does stuff like murder/assault/human trafficking/drugs/etc. The strong reactions against just paying the ransom, even if it's cheaper and a clear winner from the individual first order perspective of Baltimore City, stem from this and that hasn't changed. Even if it costs $18 million vs $76k, that is still $0 directly going to the criminals themselves. On some real level, if Baltimore just paid the ransom they would be attacking the rest of us for their own benefit following their own fuckup. Sometimes there might be other mitigating factors in the intensity of people's reactions, but most of them don't apply here. This wasn't an innocent or complex mistake, it was utter, mind blowing incompetence at the most basic level. It wasn't a matter of economics either, or technological sophistication. They'd be immensely better off if they'd merely aimed at any basic network share and cycled a few USB hard drives into a safe deposit box twice a month. That'd still be embarrassingly primitive and ineffective by any remotely modern standard for any significant organizational entity, yet it'd be something. And since it's a democratically elected government entity the complaints about it falling on citizens fall a bit flat too, because citizens have a duty to be checking on their government in a democracy. And this has been a lesson that has helped push things forward elsewhere at long last, so some good came from it that wouldn't have if the ransom had been paid. So basically yes, it remains true for a lot of us.