Welcome to Digital Crime & Digital Ransom

When I was watching Mr Robot on Amazon Prime Video a few weeks ago, I thought I was still watching an extension of sci-fi. In the serial the protagonist is a young punk hacker, who doses himself with 30mg of morphine and a bit of a wiz kid at cyber security. He comes to the lime light when he manages to prevent an attack from a megacorp called E Corp.

The character in the serial Elliot Alderson is a young man who lives in New York and works at the cyber security company Allsafe as a security engineer. He is constantly struggling with a social identity dis-order and clinical depression and Elliot's thought process seems heavily influenced by paranoia and/or delusion. He connects to people by hacking them, which often leads him to act as a cyber-vigilante. He is recruited by a mysterious Mr. Robot and joins his team of activists known as fsociety. They are on a mission to cancel all consumer debt by destroying the data of one of the largest corporations in the world, E Corp which also funnily happens to be Allsafe's biggest client.

Now fiction is becoming reality.

When WPP was hacked yesterday the whole world was aghast. A trip to their website revealed a hurriedly put up message with bad punctuation, unusual for a company that is headquartered in the UK, the bastions of the English language.

When employees arrived at their companies for work, they were surprised to see a digital ransom note on their locked PCs that demanded they pay up or lose all of their files.

Company staff with infected computers were greeted with a message saying that the user's files had been encrypted and that it would cost more than $300 in Bitcoin to free them, as part of a worldwide cyberattack.

This seems like the beginning of digital crime and digital ransom.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency and a digital payment system invented by an unknown programmer, or a group of programmers, under the name Satoshi Nakamoto. It was released as open source software in 2009.

According to Wikipedia Bitcoin is a worldwide cryptocurrency and digital payment system called the first decentralized digital currency, as the system works without a central repository or single administrator. It was invented by an unknown person or group of people under the name Satoshi Nakamoto and released as open-source software in 2009.

WPP and Mondeléz were among the many companies attacked with "ransomware," which typically infects computer systems, phones, and e-mail. In this type of attack, the hacker typically asks for ransom money, but they are usually not looking to hack e-mails or steal data from the company under attack.

Major firms, airports and government departments in Ukraine have also been struck by a massive cyber attack which began to spread across Europe. 

Cybersecurity expert, Gerome Billois, explains how it works and how he thinks it found its way into major firm's software in this youtube video.

Tech thrillers are now coming to life. Welcome to Digital Crime and Digital Ransom.

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