DARK SCREENS

Delving into the terrifying economy of ransomware.

Shortland, professor of political economy at King’s College London, makes a persuasive case for the dangerous fragility of our interconnected digital world. Shortland traces the origins of hacking and loose, experimental communities in 1963, when enthusiasts used audio tones to access commercial telephone networks as early online social spaces. These self-styled explorers, largely harmless, gave way as the internet expanded to far more predatory actors. By 1989, new extortionist ransomware hackers emerged, evolving into a lucrative criminal enterprise with the power to disrupt modern life at scale. The book’s central conflict—between IT professionals and criminal hackers—is a struggle between adversaries “cut from the same cloth.” Both sides deploy similar skills across contested digital terrain, though many ransomware groups remain operationally sloppy, prone to unforced errors that limit their effectiveness. The author’s broader analysis is incisive: “Cybercrime can be viewed as the shadow twin of the vast wealth of the tech elites and the (savvy, lucky or well-connected) shareholders who invested in their ventures.” A parallel service economy has flourished alongside this shadow world. Private resolution firms arose to help victims “keep quiet, pay fast, help clients with the decryption.” By 2021, ransomware was acknowledged as a national security threat. Anne Neuberger, one of the Biden Administration’s cyber czars, called it “the most disruptive set of adversaries today in cyberspace.” Still, criminals remain confident. A mastermind declares, “This business works—and will always work.” The danger, Shortland suggests, is normalization, when “most citizens have become accustomed to the idea that their addresses and social security numbers are sloshing around the darknet alongside those of hundreds of millions of others.”

A sharp, fast-moving examination of ransomware and the criminal ecosystems that sustain it.