“At a certain level, the alleged perfect security of the dark web becomes amenable to enquiry”

There are some strange rules in techno-shock stories published in the mainstream media. Ever-larger counts of stolen data sets from ever-more-remote corporates form a constant backdrop to the self-appointed superheroes, videoing themselves laying down the actual law to some distant, bemused office of identity scammers before wiping all their machines with one click of the mouse. Altogether there’s a certain sense of predictability to the affair, a way that the whole matter can fit into our view of our societies and how they work.

One of the oddities always makes me look up when a ransomware story comes by, and it’s that there are upper limits to the amounts of money paid over in ransom scams. This is of semi-professional interest to me, because as a callow spotty lad I got to play around with a portfolio of loans totalling some £2 billion. When I say “play around”, I mean I had access to a read-only copy of the databases, and a whole boardroom of impatient, irascible banking directors had access to me. I quickly learned that there was no approximating with that amount of money and that audience: you had to be able to track what was happening to the millions, the pennies, and every other amount of money in between.

So when I see an artificial cut-off in the reporting of the scale of the ransoms being demanded, I become suspicious and want to find out why. Not an easy topic