The Strange History of Ransomware

These paradoxical facts, coupled with his lawyers’ later claims that Popp planned on donating his ransomware profits to alternative AIDS education programs, led some to conclude the doctor was actually some kind of crypto-anarchist Robin Hood trying to trigger reforms. Less than two weeks after unleashing the virus, Popp became unnerved while traveling back to the U.S. from a WHO seminar on AIDS in Nairobi, where news of the AIDS Trojan had been a hot topic. A recent ransomware lock screen demands bitcoins.It’s not the first time AIDS has been invoked as a metaphor to convey the destructive power of malware, but I’ve come to believe there is an intimate psychological link between ransomware in particular and the virus that first inspired its creation.

Source: medium.com