[civilian]

He's not being defensive, you're being a zealot.

It is important to recognize that crimes have different levels. Society understands that, and it's encoded in our laws in the way we define scaling punishments, and have a difference between misdemeanors and felonies.

For thefts, there's a distinction between "burglary", "robbery", and "robbery with a deadly weapon".

And in this case-- comparing ransomware of a university to terrorism is disproportionate.

[waihtis]

FYI I’m not the original poster who commented on the terrorism aspect, but I think ransomware is difficult to categorize because it is often a spray and pray-type attack. And occasionally a vulnerability and other infection vectors line up neatly enough to cause huge damage.

So in this case, the better analogy would be explosives - someone tried to blow a safe to get the money inside but the explosion also killed an innocent bystander.