Will ransomware incidents decrease now that ransomware operators are being arrested?
I could deny access to something that's useless to me and can’t be resold, but it's valuable to the owner — that is a business model for the attacker. It's still relatively novel and we don't have a clear picture of how to deal with the economics of that. Most cybersecurity economics are around credit card numbers, PII or PHI, all of which you can sell elsewhere, and ransomware is almost the opposite of that. We’re not too far into figuring out the effect that this difference in economic incentive has on the behavior of the adversary, and then the behavior of the defender.
That's a good point: the data they get is only valuable to you. They're not going for important patent-level engineering secrets or something.
https://brothke.medium.com/how-to-stop-robocalls-in-an-hour-and-it-has-nothing-to-do-with-articul8-9a33fcb553f2
The thing that the North Carolina Attorney General has in common with Russians is that the incentives work in a similar way. If you have a particular set of outcomes you're incentivized to achieve, or if you're trying to prevent that from a leadership position, the mechanics are broadly the same.
The somewhat perverse incentive is that the telcos profit off these calls. They’re charging for every call that's connected. The common refrain is, "It’s way too complex." But Verizon will not let billions of calls go through if they can’t get reimbursed for them. The telcos don't have an incentive to stop this because they're making money.
https://brothke.medium.com/the-fcc-telecoms-know-robocalls-can-be-stopped-now-you-can-know-that-also-5503461b764c