Bitcoin Forum

Research is suggesting that the number of ransomware incidents has risen in 2019. The payment method of choice for the majority of this cybercrime is cryptocurrency, predominantly bitcoin. Could BTC price fluctuations be linked to the increase in this online nefarious activity?

https://bitcoinist.com/could-ransomware-be-driving-up-bitcoin-prices/

Bitcoin is quite expensive, so such scammers doing this online nefarious activity are interested in receiving it. Your guess seems right to me

No, ransomware based crimes are big enough of a market to be pumping up bitcoin rates. People aren't going to push up the BTC price just because they are required to pay of hackers...

Ransomware has been around for years and it's the press once again spinning it a new angle with it only being popular due to crypto-currencies. Not true, it's been around and people where previously forced to pay via fiat transactions anyway.

Probably something hard to put a finger on, whales buying up, or there just being a larger demand for crypto-currencies.

No.

Ransomware authors have collected a few milllions of USD worth of Bitcoin, meaning their victims bought those BTC, driving the price up. Obviously that amount is nowhere near enough to influence the market on any truly noticeable scale. And then, the people behind ransomware probably sold a lot of those coins, offsetting any price gains.

I'm amazed how these crypto journalists spin stories out of nothing, without applying any common sense at all.

Might be true. Victims of this ransomware are forcing them to pay in Bitcoin. Meaning, it could affect the price because victims have to buy Bitcoin just to pay them. I just don't know if hackers are quickly liquidate Bitcoin after victims paid. But it's a bad publicity for Bitcoin. Hackers are now more free and safe because of this technology. Even the transaction can be tracked. Still no one ever caught on ransomware. That's why I can't blame government why they are some against it.

Yeah but the quantities of bitcoin are probably not enough to affect the price in a meaningful way.  I would also point out that bitcoin prices have *not* been driven up lately.  It's been just the opposite, and anybody would know this with a quick look at a 1 year bitcoin price chart.

There was a thread about this a couple years ago if I'm remembering it correctly.  And as I said, whatever ransom these extortionists/criminals are asking, even if the victim had to buy bitcoin on the open market the number of bitcoins isn't enough to drive the price anywhere.  I'm sure if they had to pay something like 100,000BTC that might be true, but nobody is asking that for a ransom.

IMHO, Nope. Yes, it's known that ransomware attacks has increased overtime and it requires the victims to buy bitcoin. But these attackers probably eventually selling it afterwards and like what explained by hatshepsut with those facts that the article has brought. The market has grown before because of the FOMO, it had contributed but minimal.

It is true that ransomware forces people to pay before letting them reaccess their folders on their computers etc. . But the thing is that it is not that easy to drive up Bitcoin price dramatically by doing that.

I think this assumption is unfounded especially when the article mentioned a correlation between these "ransom incidents" and Bitcoin prices - positing the idea that big companies are buying up Bitcoin to prepare for such attacks. :)

And I find it quite confusing and ridiculous since companies allocating a huge amount of its money to buy up Bitcoin in preparation for ransonware attacks didn't make sense when ideally it could allocate that money to further strengthen its security so as not to be victimized by these types of malwares.

If you were the CEO of a company, would  you buy $1 million worth of BTC and wait for an attack or would you spend it to harden your computer systems defenses to avoid such attacks and maybe do contingency planning instead? :)

If ransomware is driving up the cost of bitcoin it's not doing a very good job. Seriously bud, what on earth are you talking about?

We're in a crab market. Now shoosh and stop wasting everybody's time.

Absolute. It can still influence the price even in small amounts if there's so many victims. Bitcoin is the safehaven for hackers and they can just easily extort money from their victims without knowing any personal details of them. This is quite alarming tho. Most of the victims being reported are huge companies. What's next? The government or Banks. No wonder why so many Bitcoin haters.

Good theory but it doesn't make sense at all. Yes ransomware are numbers are growing but I don't think that the victims are going to fall for that kind of trap. There could be some however, majority shouldn't pay those cyber criminals. And there are a lot of ethical and white hackers as well who are helping to produce or create a decryptor and they are very much active hunting malwares and exposing the way they spread in the ecosystem. So your theory is very flawed in the beginning and there's no correlation at all.

Nope. I've read of plenty of places already having a contingency fund for this. I would hope that the rash of ransomware has also inspired more people to back up properly so they won't need to pay it.

Also when I've seen people turn up here and on places like r/bitcoin who've fallen victim to it the majority have mentioned localbitcoins so even if they are buying it's off exchange.

By this point if you're wide open to being hit by this you're an absolute moron. Backing up is a lot less onerous.

There are more ransomware attacks around the globe demanding ransom in terms of bitcoin. With this the chances of the total amount affecting the bitcoin is very low. By that time there will be some price manipulation. This is done by the large scale market holders who tend to profit out of anything happening in the crypto ecosystem.

Paying of ransom is same as making a transaction. This isn't gonna influence the market, today the market volume is around $205 billion and maybe the percentage of the Ransome might be less than 0.5% which is not a driving factor of bitcoin prices.

I believe this ransomware does not contribute to the price fluctuation of Bitcoin.  I think that the BTC paid were automatically converted into different altcoin particularly altcoins with privacy feature,  Aside from that,  I do not think that the demand cost by this pepetruators have the capability to push the price of Bitcoin up.

this is not the first time some shitty crypto news site makes up a story like this. in fact this story is one of the old ones and was mostly popular a couple of years ago when Ransomware was starting to make a lot of noise. right now they seem to have run out of nonsense to publish so they have stooped to a new low of repeating the old dusty ones.
if you think about it, the total size of it is not even big enough to put a dent in the market. and don't forget that total didn't happen in one day so you have to compare it with the volume of the entire time that it took to get there.

There is no way that these ransomware incidents will drive the price of BTCitcoin unless people are spending billions of dollars to pay them, these scammers will be caught since they are using BTCitcoin for these activities and historically we have many spending their time behind bars for using BTCitcoin for illegal activities. Yesterday the market went down drastically may be because the scammers stopped accepting BTCitcoin  :P ;D.  

Wherever Bitcoin is moving whether down or up, analysts will always look for possible reasons behind. And they usually have the skill in leading us to believe that one or two things can have a great effect on Bitcoin's price. Any demand for Bitcoin will always have an effect but whether the effect can be significant then that is another story. Ransomware has been spiking and most probably this can go on for a long time as long as we will have people and organizations falling victims to this crime and paying for it. However, on my assessment, this may not be significant not unless maybe 1% of the whole population who are online can be victimized by ransomware and majority of them are buying Bitcoin to pay the fees demanded by hackers. Attributing to something evil and unnecessary may not be doing good to something like Bitcoin, in the same way we don't really say that scams are contributing a lot to making the economy grow.

There are no simple answer for that, because not all payments that are done for ransomware are recorded. You can write ransomware that are specifically targeted at specific individuals or companies and those people might be given their own Bitcoin address for payments that would not be reflected in any statistics that are collect out there.  ::)

The amount of people that are actually paying this is also very small and this will not have a significant impact on Bitcoin's price on all the exchanges where millions are traded daily.  ;)

I think that the ransomware will act even tougher than before and we should not hope that the amount of the ransom will be less. You need to be vigilant and be able to protect your data.

Why everything that happens in the world need to be connected in bitcoin or cryptocurrency?does ransomware incidents really require bitcoin as payments.?but what I learn is ransomware cybercrime is mostly victimizing crypto investors since it’s. Easy to transact and easy payments also

Sadly i'm pretty sure that ransomware is diminishing the price of mBitcoin and allowing critics to point towards such activities in order to drive the price down and avoid regulation.

Ransomware is harming the reputation of Bitcoin. Two years ago, I lost my everything by a ransomware attack and they asked me to pay 500 USD in Bitcoin, there was no another option to pay them. This year it attacked one of my facebook friends PC, and he was very sad that Bitcoin is using by these criminals. I don't think Ransomware can driving up Bitcoin price anyhow.

It still depends, since not all of the victims are paying, most of them are just formatting their computer and let the files be gone. But when it comes to big companies that needs the files, they are bound to accept their fate, except those that are just new, when the solution for the ransomeware was created. Meaning to say that not much effect has been impacted the market because of this reason.

The thieves clearly do not influence the price especially recent price.

I hope it becomes possible to blacklist those addresses immediately once they are discovered. I wouldn't even mind if the addresses are frozen immediately via some sort of quick community consensus. If no one comes to claim the bitcoin, it can then be handed over to security agencies.
 It would be good to have forum-like platform where those who feel their coins were unjustly frozen can provide proves for the community to decide whether to unfreeze the coins.
I guess this hasn't been considered because it could be abused in the future.

I think they can, but slightly, it is unlikely that they can change the price of bitcoin so much

Well it could be one reason why the price increased in this year.
The people who are victim of this ransomware could be a non crypto person so if there are so many victims then this would be a fresh money for the market and the price would surely move.
Just think about how much ransom that the victim would pay and how many of them are going to instantly buy it in order to get their computer free.

I do not think that anyone can significantly affect the price of bitcoin

I don't think people paying in BTC is enough for the price fluctuations we see today. Besides, the price today isn't really doing good. The OP has a point but I don't think it's enough factor that could drive the price up. It's still mainly by whales, or by trading which is primarily affected by news and such. I also don't think that it would do any good even if BTC is introduced to innocent victims via these ransomwares, because most likely, the victims would remember BTC in a negative way, as used in illegal activities.