SAN FRANCISCO -- Hackers are discovering that it is more profitable to hold important data hostage than it is to steal it.
A decade-old Internet scourge called ransomware went mainstream Friday when cybercriminals seized control of computers around the world, from the delivery giant FedEx in the United States to the computers that power Britain's public health system, universities in China and Russia's Interior Ministry.
Ransomware is nothing new. For years, there have been stories of people or companies horrified that they have been locked out of their computers and that the only way back in is to pay a ransom to someone, somewhere who has managed to take control.
But with the advent of new tools that wrap victims' data with tough encryption technology, hard-to-trace digital currency like bitcoins, and even online sites that offer to do the data ransoming in return for a piece of the action, hackers have become emboldened.
"You don't even need to have any skills to do this anymore," said Jason Rebholz, a senior director at the Crypsis Group who has helped dozens of victims of ransomware.
Ransomware has allowed people who are not computer experts to become computer thieves. It used to be that hackers had to be a little creative and skilled to get money out of people. There were fake anti-virus scams that promised to clean up a computer -- for a fee. Sometimes they resorted to Trojan horse programs that lie in wait on e-commerce or banking sites, ready to seize credit-card numbers. And there was old-fashioned hacking, grabbing all sorts of personal credentials that could be sold on the dark Web.
But computer criminals are discovering that ransomware is the most effective way to make money in the shortest amount of time.
As data have become a lifeline, cybercriminals have elevated their game and their demands. Just five years ago, attackers in eastern Europe were locking up victims' computers and demanding ransoms of $100 to $400 to unlock them.
But the idea of paying a criminal on the Internet was still new, and most important, technicians and security experts could find ways to unlock computers without caving on the ransom. In 2012, security experts estimated that fewer than 3 percent of victims paid.
These days, it's a 50-50 split between those who pay the ransom and those who refuse, either because they have adequate backups, are philosophically opposed or simply cannot afford to pay.
Ransoms now range from as little as one bitcoin, which equates to roughly $1,700, to as many as 30 bitcoin, about $51,000, with the median ransom equating to four bitcoin, or nearly $7,000, according to researchers at the Crypsis Group.
Bitcoin has given cybercriminals an easy and anonymous way to get their profits, and it is much harder to track than credit cards or wire transfers.
There is even now a concept of "ransomware as a service" -- a play on the Silicon Valley jargon "software as a service," which describes the delivery of software over the Internet.
Now anyone can visit a Web page, generate a ransomware file with the click of a mouse, encrypt someone's systems and demand a ransom to restore access to the files. If the victim pays, the ransomware provider takes a cut of the payment.
Ransomware criminals also have customer service lines that victims can call to get help paying a ransom. There are even live-chat options. And while some amateur ransomware attackers may not restore victims' data once the ransom is paid, the more professional outfits worry that if they do not decrypt a victim's data, their reputation and "business" may suffer as a result, Rebholz said.
The most notorious of these attackers, a group called SamSam after its type of ransomware, is known for demanding the highest ransoms, 25 to 30 bitcoins. But they reliably decrypt a victim's data after being paid.
Most small- to medium-size businesses pay the ransoms because they do not have backups of their data and feel they have no other option, Rebholz said. "That data is the bloodline of their business in many cases," he said. "They can either go out of business or pay the ransom."
Cybercriminals also have found a soft target in universities, which usually have more open systems that allow for the free flow of information.
More recently, they have found a niche in health care, where ransomware attacks take on a new level of urgency as doctors and emergency rooms in Britain discovered Friday when hackers blocked their access to patient records, and patients had to be turned away.
Imperial College Healthcare in London, for example, was hit with ransomware 19 times over 12 months, according to freedom-of-information requests submitted by SentinelOne, a security firm.
In the United States, the number of reported ransomware attacks rose fourfold between 2015 and 2016, as did the ransom payments to hackers, to $1 billion, according to the FBI.
Nearly half of ransomware attacks begin by persuading an employee to click on an email. Sometimes the way in is a little more complicated. Cybercriminals will deploy a "watering hole attack," infecting websites and waiting for victims, then downloading ransomware onto their machines.
The other half, Rebholz and others said, target victims with "brute force" methods: Hackers scan an organization for software vulnerabilities, weak passwords or other unlocked digital doors. After that, ransomware attackers try to encrypt as many files as possible.
The SamSam group is known to move from file to file, manually encrypting hundreds of systems, so it can demand the highest in bitcoin ransoms, according to the Crypsis Group, Symantec and others.
It seems no one is immune. In January, a hacker held hostage a small cancer charity in Indiana, wiping the organization's main and backup servers and demanding 50 bitcoins -- more than $87,000 -- in return for restoring their data. The charity did not pay.
And ransomware attackers are not above playing martyr. In one recent attack that Rebholz tracked, the attackers tried to convince their victim that paying a "contribution" -- or ransom -- would benefit sick children around the world.
"That's where we are," Rebholz said. "Threat actors are now trying to play people's emotions, trying to put a pretty face on criminal activity by pretending to be a charity case."
Information for this article was contributed by Mark Scott of The New York Times.
A Section on 05/14/2017