Back in the early part of the last decade, the talk was all about APTs and nation state-backed campaigns

Stuxnet, Flame, Gauss and Red October. Then something changed, and the focus became more about ransomware, and crudely built. Gone was the sophistication, in was the quick money steal.

In this talk I will look at the evolution of ransomware from an irritant to an epidemic, the security factors (encryption, phishing, user fallibility, immediacy) that have contributed to ransomware being a successful vector, examine cases of “success” for ransomware and why they happened, and look at what efforts are being made to stop ransomware in its tracks.