> the criminals had very few options by which to extort money from their victims. I remember the phone dialers in the 90s. Malware would also steal your credit

> the criminals had very few options by which to extort money from their victims. I remember the phone dialers in the 90s. Malware would also steal your credit card, social security etc. Identity theft was and still is rampant why try to extort £1000 from you when I can just open a new credit card in your name with a £3000 limit and spend it all before you know its a thing. Most people who fall for these scams are elderly people who wouldn't know how to buy a bitcoin to pay a ransom. The only people that pay ransom ware are large organisations that have the funds and ability to defend themselves but choose to invest in insurance over security. > Thus the scale of the number of people you'd have to exploit to make this profitable is enormous. You mean they need to find a 0-day and then write a worm? I think this is already being done to steal millions of credit cards. > however that requires that hackers hand over the routing information to their bank account They use the bank accounts of their victims to hide from authorities and like I said they have millions of accounts. I think the rise in ransomware since the 90s is closer correlated to how much people value their data / technology.