“I was told to buy a software or lose my computer: I ignored it”

Re:“I was told to buy a software or lose my computer: I igno... by dhruvmittal on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @12:19PM (#21272100)

I'm guessing the damage numbers are higher because of a number of high-impact city-focused attacks. I live in Baltimore, where all of the city's systems were shut down for a few months over a ransomware attack asking for <100k. A similar attack occurred last year in Atlanta; wikipedia quotes a demand of 50k & Atlanta estimated around 10M in contractors for recovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Atlanta_cyberattack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Baltimore_ransomware_atta...

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Re:“I was told to buy a software or lose my computer: I igno... by Bartweiss on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @02:06PM (#21273435)

Long-tail damage to governments and hospitals is definitely part of it - there's very little upper bound on how much ransomware can cost if you botch the response badly enough. And given how much ransomware simply doesn't decrypt if you pay, there's no reason the ransom prices should have any real correlation to the damage inflicted.

The other part of it appears to be some slightly funny calculations. If ransomware shuts down Target's online store for a day, Target might compute the loss based on 24 hours of no revenue, but purchases that go to Amazon, or to Target a day later, shouldn't be added into total "damage". The dollar value being computed there is something more like disruption.

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