The first ransomware payment I saw predated Bitcoin, and had the victims use a Western Union money order. It's definitely an inhibitor for the attacker. For a

The first ransomware payment I saw predated Bitcoin, and had the victims use a Western Union money order. It's definitely an inhibitor for the attacker. For a start, it took days for them to get payment. The current "our Onion site will detect the payment and release keys automatically" took a human workflow, which had to impact their scale. I have no doubt some sort of mule received the payment, but it's still much more traceable if overseas LE actually wanted to investigate. And managing that mule again had to hurt scale. The amount of ransomware we see today could never have happened without Bitcoin. Edit: that too started with an open RDP server. All these years and we're seeing the same vectors in this write up.