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Governments should enact legislation making the payment of a Cybersecurity ransom a criminal offense with serious penalties. Organizations would then be faced with the choice of paying the bribe or facing time in jail - an uneasy decision. However, the effect would be to reduce the likelihood of ransom payment, thereby reducing the incentive to launch such an attack in the first place.

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That would spur generation of creative paperwork like fake "support contracts" or "licensing" deals.

I think best solution was IIRC in Italy where whole families of people kidnapped by mafia had assets frozen. It made ransom inattractive. So in this case company could apply for having frozen all funds in exchange for evidence. It would both mostly absolve the management from the ethical dilemma, punish those responsible for negligent IT and make ransoms less attractive.

So the mere threat of a ransomware attack would be enough to extract huge sums of money.

Presumably paying that ransom would also be illegal.

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