Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden have written a useful guide to the subject
The Ransomware Hunting Team. By Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 368 pages; $30 and £23.99
On July 16th 2019 Teiranni Kidd, heavily pregnant, was admitted to hospital in Alabama. Unbeknown to her, the hospital had been hit with a ransomware attack—a malicious program had scrambled its computers, and the attackers were demanding money to restore them. With its systems down, medics were forced to rely on pen and paper to get their jobs done. In a subsequent lawsuit Ms Kidd alleges that, because of this, nobody noticed her daughter’s birth was going badly. The baby was eventually born with severe brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen during the delivery, and died nine months later.
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Over the past decade ransomware attacks have spread like knotweed. Alabama’s hospitals are not the only ones to have been affected. When Britain’s National Health Service was hit in 2017 more than a third of the country’s hospital trusts were compromised. In 2021 a big American oil pipeline was crippled, leading to a declaration of emergency in 17 states and Washington, DC. Train services, ports and even entire cities have been affected, as have millions of ordinary people who have seen family photographs, work projects and private documents held hostage by attackers.
Though the general idea is easy to grasp—criminals encrypt the target’s files, then ask for money to decrypt them again—the nuts and bolts of cybercrime are often baffling to the uninitiated. Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden, a pair of journalists, have written a good introduction to the subject. They focus as much on people as on the computers. Their book is named after a group of volunteers who try to fight back against hackers.
Ransomware makes use of cryptography, the same mathematical technique that protects credit-card data and instant messages from prying eyes as they are transmitted across the internet. Done properly, files scrambled by ransomware are unrecoverable unless you pay the hackers for a long alphanumeric key. But programming is only rarely done perfectly, and almost all software is full of bugs. Attackers exploit them to infect machines; ransomware code, in turn, often contains faults. The ransomware-hunters can sometimes find those chinks in its digital armour, allowing victims to retrieve their files without paying.
Many of the team members are “white-hat” hackers (ie, ethical hackers). Their reasons for fighting back include relish of the technical challenge and a strong sense of justice. They cannot always help, but when they can, they make a point of refusing payment for their services—though they sometimes express exasperation at the ingratitude of some of the people they assist.
Having access to those at the sharp end provides the authors with some fascinating anecdotes. Pricked by his conscience, a remorseful hacker contacts a member of the team to offer decryption keys for nothing. Other gang members make contact to undermine rival gangs or pursue vendettas, tipping off the researchers to weaknesses in their competitors’ software.
It is still unclear where the ransomware story will end. High-profile raids and rising ransom demands have persuaded governments to take the threat seriously. Shortly after the oil-pipeline attack the gang behind it shut down, citing pressure from American authorities.
But other factors are boosting the industry, not hindering it. By paying out to victims, insurance firms inflate ransom demands. Companies have sprung up to smooth the process of paying the ransoms, which are often demanded in cryptocurrency. That helps victims recover files—and reassures the criminals that more victims will pay in future. Even the work of ransomware-hunters puts pressure on the crooks to refine their software, pushing them to eliminate bugs and make it bulletproof. The ransomware business is complicated, ruthless and growing fast. Those looking for a guide should start here. ■
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Hacked off"
Culture October 21st 2022
From the October 21st 2022 edition
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