> One way to break out of the prisoner's dilemma is to place an outside cost on 'defecting' from the socially optimal choice; There might exist additional effe

> One way to break out of the prisoner's dilemma is to place an outside cost on 'defecting' from the socially optimal choice; There might exist additional effective measures: 1. requiring by law that companies, hospitals and so on, do effective backups; controlling that this actually does happen and handing stiff fines to companies that do not. 2. the government acting as an insurance for damages in companies which fall prey to ransomware, covering their losses completely if they provide proof that they did not pay. Also, there is an additional problem with ransom payments: As you cannot prove who is the recipient, how can you refute the suspicion that the company is not victim to ransomware but one of the company's owners is extracting profits without paying taxes? I mean, if you work as a cashier in a supermarket, you cannot tell your boss that somehow the money in the cash register got lost or that it was taken away by an armed robber which is not visible on any security video picture. The counter-measure would be to put full regular taxes on profits on any kind of proclaimed ransom payment.