What began as an act of revenge by Harvard educated evolutionary biologist Joseph Popp — who was not considered for a permanent position at the World Health Organization — turned out to be the malicious step towards institutionalising the dark economy of hacking. In 1989, Popp mailed thousands of floppy disks to health researchers with AIDS education content, but the disks were infected with malware. The victims’ computer hard drives could only be restored after the originator was paid to unlock it. Popp, known as the father of malware, used a payment mechanism that was easily accessible to the victim but not the police.

Anja Shortland, a professor at King’s College, traces the malware path that was paved in 1989 and which has now fully grown into a ransom industry worth $1 billion each year. The cost to global business in 2025 has been a whopping $74 billion. “It is like trashing a car to steal a pair of sunglasses,” quips Shortland. Popp’s plot to extract payment for holding data hostage didn’t last long, but before falling into obscurity he could bequeath a blueprint for ransomware for later generation of hackers.

Since its first appearance in the late ’80s, ransomware has gone through many astonishing changes. Ransomware quickly advanced from a low-level nuisance to a problem touching all facets of society. A ransomware attack is a cybercrime in which hackers use malware to encrypt data and charge a fee to receive a decryption key. In financial terms it might seem an inefficient form of crime, but it is still growing all across the internet-connected world.

Reshaping online existence

Shortland, a leading expert in cyber crime, peels many layers of the digital underworld that is reshaping our online existence in her latest book We Know You Can Pay a Million. The book seeks to explore the large corporate set-ups that have grown around the ransomware industry. The most amazing aspect of this industry is that the havoc wreaked by ransomware is many times over the amount collected by cybergangs. For instance, such has been the impact of the attack at Jaguar Land Rover that production was pushed back by weeks. The British Library is yet to fully recover from the hacking it suffered in 2023.

The astonishing aspect of ransomware attacks is that every attack inspires further attacks. Despite the effort and creativity that go into taking every attack down, the threat of ransomware to companies and individuals keeps getting bigger. The arrests and takedowns lead to proliferation and splintering of ransomware brands. For instance, security experts could spot as many as 75 ransomware strains, with an average of 45 groups active each month in the recent past. LockBit, a leading ransomware group, asserts: “This business works…and will always work…takedown isn’t an indication of a systematic problem with ransomware.”

A global challenge

Shortland says that ransomware became a real problem from 2013 onwards when the internet became widespread. The challenge is trans-boundary and indeed global. Between 2021 and 2024, the US alone counted some 4,900 attacks leading to at least $3.1 billion in ransomware payments. For anyone tracking the daily stream of global ransomware attacks, the extreme vulnerability of global and local supply chains, public services and transport/critical infrastructure is abundantly clear.

Artificial intelligence will escalate the problem, making it easier for ransomware gangs to target a country. It will have serious repercussions to national security and peoples’ lives. Costa Rica was attacked in 2022, and has valid reasons for promotion of higher standards of cyber-hygiene. Shortland has proposed the counter-ransomware dashboard with four interconnected features including penalties and resilience. She further suggests that ransomware be brought into the sphere of broad political debate. Politicians must be pressed to formulate clear cybersecurity strategies. This book may not be of interest to the average reader but must get the attention of the right people to avoid unimaginable catastrophe.

The reviewer is an independent writer, researcher and academic

Title: We Know You Can Pay a Million: Inside the Dark Economy of Hacking and Ransomware

Author: Anja Shortland

Publisher: Hachette, New Delhi

Price: ₹699

Published on June 14, 2026