blue tangle

  If you want inspiration for a slidedeck on the history of ransomware look no further. Where I wanted to nail down specific dates I looked for when ransomware strains or incidents made the mainstream news and used that as my base timeline. The slides cover the first incident of data held for ransom that I could find (in 1981) through to Karakurt as what I see as the future of ransomware, touching on targeted ransomware attacks and the advent of Big Game Hunting in between. The talk is made to be delivered in about 25 - 30 minutes, though I was cutting it rather close with that timing. Feel free to use and alter this PowerPoint as you wish.  

  I'll be presenting at BSides Dundee on August 6th, discussing the entire history of ransomware in only 25 minutes. I've learned a lot doing the research for the talk. So much of what we understand about the history of hacking seems to be the same somewhat random selection of events written up with mistakes and incorrect assumptions then copied and pasted across dozens and dozens of blogs, news articles and academic papers forever, without anyone revisiting the actual primary sources for the events from the time that they happened. What was the first webshell to be written? Who was the victim of the first DDoS? What was the first computer virus discovered in the wild? Look any of this up online and you'll either find wildly conflicting answers or no information at all, we are not good at documenting our own history. Anyway, that's my rant over, look forward to giving this talk and hope to see some of you in attendance!