Keen On

“It’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses are the ransom. The damage to the car is fifty to seventy-five billion dollars a year.” — Anja Shortland Cybercrime is booming. Ransomware attacks — where criminal gangs encrypt your servers and hold your data hostage until you pay — cost victims somewhere between fifty and seventy-five billion dollars a year in damage. The hackers themselves pocket around a billion. As Anja Shortland, professor of political economy at King’s College London and author of Dark Screens: Hackers and Heroes in the Shadowy World of Ransomware, puts it: “it’s like wrecking a car to steal a pair of sunglasses.” The sunglasses are the ransom. The wrecked car is the damage to the rest of us. Shortland is an expert in extortive crime — transactions where a legal entity has to make a deal with a criminal group under conditions of zero trust. She has studied kidnap for ransom, Somali piracy, art theft, and now the booming business of ransomware. What fascinates her i