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Comment by sho | Hacker News Reader

Devil's advocate: ransomware is good. The financial incentives around it directly encourage this variety of hacking. It's an involuntary "bug bounty". And IT security becomes something more than a "nice to have" for these institutions, which it never would have before.

$450k? Universities know all about paying to learn. That's cheap, and they won't make the same mistakes again.

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Crime reduction is good. Therefore crime is also good because it incentivizes crime reduction.

murder is good because it discourages people from engaging in behavior that may cause them to be murdered

Is this not the rationale behind the death penalty?

Actually, depending on the cost of mitigating this sort of disaster in the future, they may learn the lesson that it is simply less expensive to pay the ransom.

The criminals doing these sorts of things are businesses too, the are unlikely to price themselves out.

Nonsense, it's not like it's one criminal group behind this or like these people are building a sustainable business model. Pay and ignore approach doesn't work at all long term.

Well, that is a decision every institution needs to make by themselves, of course. At least now there is a visible price tag attached, rather than trying to hide behind misuse laws ("it's ILLEGAL to access our systems in that way!")

Markets in everything: The price of ransomware will reach equilibrium when the cost of paying the ransom becomes equal to the cost of paying for cybersecurity. Then we're back to "to pay or not to pay" once again being a merely moral/ethical issue.

On the contrary: if recovery is cheaper, easier, and faster than prevention then why bother with prevention?

If you think there's a 10% chance of incurring $1m in ransomware costs over the next 12 months, and reducing that probability to 5% will introduce an ongoing annual expense of $100,000 what's the sensible decision from a financial perspective?

What about the fact that payed ransoms prove a viable business model? And I bet hackers can hack faster than unis can secure themselves

$450k is about tuition for 56 instate or 17 out of state students. Basically peanuts. The U is $8,048 for Utah residents and $25,361 for out-of-state students. It has a total undergraduate enrollment of 24,743

So about a quarter of a percent of their tuition income? That's pretty massive, considering this is an unexpected cost.

The U has a 4.83 billion budget.

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