[MinelloGiacomo]

For my MSc in Cyber Risk strategy & governance my final dissertation was built on the parallelism of Italy's ban on payment of ransoms for kindnappings and the current ransomware trend. It's difficult to take solid conclusions, the measure could be effective in disrupting some financially motivated attackers but, given the current landscape, I guess the threat actors could shift more towards extorting end users where the ban will be more difficult to enforce. Ransomware rely heavly on financial incentives, for a company it comes down to cost but the same holds as well for threat actors, they try to go after the bigest whales they can get away with. Insurances may be loopholes, in Italy at the time they were banned as well.

[fullspectrumdev]

So what’s interesting is only a few years ago, ransomware such as CryptoLocker largely targeted individuals home machines as opposed to companies. Companies being hit was rarer.

The ransom would be a few hundred dollars.

Things got rather interesting after WannaCry and NotPetya - some underground markets/sites banned discussion of ransomware for a while, a lot of groups went quiet.

Then it came back with almost exclusively targeting of enterprise/companies for big payoffs instead of a shitload of small payoffs.