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The time I sabotaged my editor with ransomware I bought for $150 on the dark web

- Drake Bennett

As you may be aware, there’s money to be made on the internet. The question, of course, is how. Not everyone has the reality-distortion skills to start their own tech unicorn, or the Stanford connections to become an early employee there, or the indifference to sunlight necessary to become a world-class Fortnite gamer. Not everyone lives in the relatively few places where software engineering jobs are well-paying and plentiful.

If you’re willing to break the law—or at least the laws of the U.S., a country you may not yourself call home—your options expand. You can steal credit card numbers, or just buy them in bulk. You can hijack bank accounts and wire yourself money, or you can hijack email accounts and fool someone else into wiring you money. You can scam the lonely on dating sites. All of these ventures, though, require resources of one kind or another: a way to sell the stuff you buy with other people’s plastic, a “mule” willing to cash out your purloined funds, or a talent for persuasion and patience for the long con. And, usually, some programming skill. But if you have none of these, there’s always ransomware.

Malicious software that encrypts data on a computer or a server, ransomware allows an attacker to extort a payment in exchange for the decryption key. Over the past year in the U.S., hackers hit the governments of Baltimore, New Orleans, and a raft of smaller municipalities, taking down city email servers and databases, police incident-report systems, in some cases even 911 dispatch centers. Hospitals, dependent on the flow of vital, time-sensitive data, have proved particularly tempting targets. So have companies that specialize in remotely managing the IT infrastructure of smaller businesses and towns— hacking them means effectively hacking all their clients.