What is helping ransomware?

What is helping ransomware? It’s how you pay the ransom and communicate without being traced.

The first time it was seen was in 1989, when it was a kind of early ransomware. The name for it was AIDS/PC cyborg. It was sent out on floppy discs, the way it was done back in the day. So, there was a biologist who studied AIDS. His name was actually Joseph Popp. He sent 20,000 infected floppy discs to research and health institutions around the world, saying they were for an AIDS introductory course. The discs contained malware. When people opened the programmes on this device, they saw a message saying that their files had been encrypted.

It’s easy and someone paid a price. It’s become much harder to track these kinds of crimes because they no longer use traditional cash transactions or wireless money transfers. Instead, they use new methods, cryptocurrencies.

The darknet is one of the reasons. The darknet is a part of the internet that is encrypted. It was set up by private researchers and the US Naval Intelligence at the beginning of the 2000s. The main goal of the Tor network, which is also called the dark network, the darknet, or the dark web, was to let people in authoritarian countries talk to each other and the rest of the world without worrying that the government would find out who they are or where they live.

So, they use a complicated system of server nodes that basically bounce around between the original sender and the destination. They do this by making your IP address hard to read. When you use the internet, your computer is given a unique login code called an IP address. If you have done something wrong on the regular internet, all the police have to do is look at your IP address. They already know who and where you are. They can come to your house, take your computer, and look at everything on it.

When you go to the darknet, your IP address gets scrambled. This makes it possible for you to host, send, or receive information without the authorities knowing who you are. It’s no cost. If you wanted to, you could get it in the next two minutes.

It’s also okay to download. You just need to get a Tor browser, which is about 10 megabytes in size. Then you’re all set to go. This encryption software is very powerful and complicated, so you can use it to hide what you do online. Even though they are free, the codes that Tor uses to encrypt your computer communications are very strong. You would need a supercomputer and about 10,000 years to break a single line of code with a blunt-force decryption attack. So it’s very, very powerful, as long as you don’t use it in a way that leaves your computer open to other threats. So Tor was an important piece of the puzzle and cryptocurrencies would be the other big part.