There's been some reporting of basically a new version of that for the modern "as a service" times, like here https://www.zdnet.com/article/darkside-the-ransomware-group-...

> According to FireEye, affiliates are required to pay up to 25% of ransom payments under $500,000, and 10% of any successful extortion attempts over $5 million.

So the ransomware authors might not always be the people collecting the initial payments. Although according to the press release here, it was siezed from the DarkSide group itself? So it's still a bit confusing.

Question really becomes where did that group get the software from? It could be multiple levels of indirection such as people hired to develop the stuff aren't really connected to activities. They might just as well be contractors not so well paid...

> "Script kiddies" got their name because 20 years ago any kid could download some code and create a DDoS attack by running a pre-written script. Ransomware hacks seem a bit more sophisticated, even with today's highly modular malware.

They're downloadable and leased out.

This allows people to focus on choosing targets instead of the entire vertical integration and liability at each step.

How much sophistication does it take to attack a computer system running software that hasn’t been patched in years?

Many so called "professionals" are still running operations with 5+ year old distributions that haven't been patched in almost as many years, and servers that people are afraid to reboot. I was once contracted by a company that was literally afraid to have any employees reboot a server because they had no idea how it worked, if it would come back up, and what to do if something didn't restart. They wanted an outside guy to take the blame.

Would’ve been a decent opportunity to contract a job paid half up front.

I took the job on the side. It was literally the equivalent of "set up a couple of static web servers with FTP accounts, and move everything over." It was about 8 hours of work and 100 hours of meetings.

./nestea.o