How Ransomware Conquered the World

Ransomware can hit anyone, but hackers are increasingly targeting people who are more willing to pay up. 

- Brian Heater

It’s been a strange few years for Alina Simone. In 2011, she released her fourth full-length record, Make Your Own Danger, to critical acclaim, and followed it with a book of essays and her debut novel (You Must Go and Win), all while maintaining a journalism career and raising a young daughter. But it’s likely a 2015 opinion piece for the New York Times that garnered the most recognition for the Brooklyn-based artist. “My gravestone will say, ‘Her mom got hacked,’” she says with a laugh.

Published in January of that year, “How My Mom Got Hacked” earned Simone a deluge of media appearances, from prime-time news programs to an episode of the popular public radio program Radiolab. The story details her mother Inna’s struggles with a mysterious form of malware and the strange and surprisingly cloak-and-dagger story that unfolded in its wake.

“My mom called me one night, and she was ranting about needing to pay a ransom,” she tells PC Magazine. “I had my laptop open but was also watching TV and half listening. I thought it was a typical mom rant about her hardware crashing [and] having to pay the repair people $500 because her computer crashed. I thought she was talking in air quotes. She kept saying, ‘No, Alina, listen. I mean ransom.’”

By the time Simone got the call, there was less than a day left before the deadline. Her mother had attempted to withdraw the full amount for the ransom, but a combination of the Thanksgiving holiday, the long weekend, a snowstorm, and the highly volatile value of Bitcoin had caused her payment to fall $25 short. A failure to pay would cause the $500 ransom to double.