[joosters]

It's probably good advice for any individual person / company who gets infected. Unfortunately, it's terrible advice for society in general, because the blackmailers profit from their crime and will go on to target more people.

I'd guess that the malware users are being quite clever in keeping the ransom demands (relatively) small, to make it easy to choose to pay. They then profit in scale because targetting thousands of people is simple.

Since the ransom payments are in Bit-coin, it's possible to track the payments and work out how much money the scammers are making. Some estimates put it as high as $325 million: http://www.coindesk.com/cryptowall-325-million-bitcoin-ranso...

[icebraining]

It's irrelevant advice for society in general, because just like with spam, the costs of producing this are so low that even if the FBI had convinced 99% of people not to pay, it'd still be worth it for the scammers.