Ransomware Protection Playbook

Introduction

I've been doing computer security since 1987, for more than 34 years now. I remember the first ransomware program I, or anyone else alive at the time, saw. It arrived in December 1989 on a 5-1/4″ floppy disk and quickly became known as the AIDS PC Cyborg Trojan.

Wess didn't call it ransomware then. You don't make up entirely new classification names until you get more than one of something, and at the time it was the first and only. It remained that way for years. Little did we know that it would be the beginning of a gigantic digital crime industry and a huge blight of digital evil across the world in the decades ahead.

It was fairly simple as compared to today's ransomware programs, but it still had enough code to thoroughly obfuscate data, and its creator had enough moxie to ask for $189 ransom in order to restore the data. The story of the first ransomware program and its creator still seems too strange and unlikely even today. If someone tried to duplicate the truth in a Hollywood hacker movie, you wouldn't believe it. Today's ransomware creators and gangs are far more believable.

Dr. Joseph L. Popp, Jr., the creator of the first ransomware program, was a Harvard-educated evolutionary biologist turned anthropologist. He had become interested in AIDS research and was actively involved in the AIDS research community at the time of his arrest. How he got interested in AIDS research isn't documented, but perhaps it was his 15 years in Africa documenting hamadryas ...