1989 Ransomware

[stompix]

AIDS was introduced into systems through a floppy disk called the "AIDS Information Introductory Diskette", which had been mailed to a mailing list. Evolutionary biologist Dr. Joseph Popp, was identified as the author of the AIDS trojan horse and was a subscriber to this list.
Popp was eventually discovered by the British anti-virus industry and named on a New Scotland Yard arrest warrant. He was detained in Brixton Prison

This is the problem.
The culprit was caught in a matter of weeks following the money trail.
What about the guys that launched wannacry?

[1714694420]

1714694420

[1714694420]

1714694420

[deisik]

Was there a way to fight back and clean it up without paying?

the last one called wannacry stop the possibility tor restart your computer, so you need to shut down your sevrer/pc and do a secure erase, if when you restart you are still under wannacry, i think the only psssibility at that point is to change the ssd/hdd

which is a pain in the ass, but if you have a backup you save your data and load them again in the new hard drive

If you use secure erase under a linux boot CD or USB, then it completely erases the disk and any data is impossible to recover. It's impossible that the malware would still be there after a secure erase. Of course you lose all data unless you had a backup

In fact, this is not quite so

It may be true in respect to this Toolatetocry virus, but in general there is a possibility for a variety of viruses which could potentially inject themselves into the BIOS code, so erasing just your hard drive won't be enough (they are more of a concept than reality but not completely impossible either). In that case, you may have to update your BIOS as well. Some viruses are known to outright damage the BIOS code, and after that your computer may become unusable unless you can somehow reprogram the BIOS chip. I had been doing that myself in the past, but the procedure requires special equipment (more specifically, a programming device). If you don't have a chip programmer (and BIOS is as dead as a doornail), your only chance is to use another motherboard of the same model for flashing BIOS on the fly (I successfully did that too in my earlier days)

[TravelMug]

AIDS was introduced into systems through a floppy disk called the "AIDS Information Introductory Diskette", which had been mailed to a mailing list. Evolutionary biologist Dr. Joseph Popp, was identified as the author of the AIDS trojan horse and was a subscriber to this list.
Popp was eventually discovered by the British anti-virus industry and named on a New Scotland Yard arrest warrant. He was detained in Brixton Prison

This is the problem.
The culprit was caught in a matter of weeks following the money trail.
What about the guys that launched wannacry?

I think the culprit can be caught. You just have to watch his wallet, and follow it as well. But I guess we have for cooperation, if the hacker try to used a mixer to cover up his tracks. Or maybe blacklisted the wallet address so that he can't used any exchangers he choose to in order to covert it to fiat.

[unamis76]

Those blaming bitcoin for the invention of all evil ransomware programs should do some research.

Research is counter intuitive to keeping the masses uninformed.

Was there a way to fight back and clean it up without paying?

Many of these viruses were pretty simple and some even had coding errors that allowed them to be wiped in a relatively easy manner. But some others just infected your DOS disk files too when you tried to format your computer...

One of the things bitcoin is revolutionazing sure is ransomware. The ability for criminals to receive anonymous payments from afar is astoundingly useful to them.

That's the reason many governments are not regulating bitcoins to accept it do any regular business. Recent ransomware attack brought even more bad reputation to the bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies. Many non-bitcoin users are now thinking that bitcoins are using only for these illegal transactions. So other good things about bitcoins no one wants to know it.

Millions of dollars are used daily for many crimes, such as drug dealing. That being said, shouldn't we also stop using dollars for "regular business"?

If it wasn't Bitcoin they were using it would be something else.  It doesn't matter.

Sums it up quite well.