The perceived value of any particular information system, entity or artefact is directly proportional to the combined resources applied to protect it from unauthorised access. It is only as a function of the most simply-conceived models and idealised frameworks that such a dynamical system could ever remain static and unchanging. The reality is that complex technological contexts generate accelerating feedback loops, producing adversarial “race” conditions where attackers and defenders engage in actions that recursively amplify perceived value along with incentives to both protect and illegitimately acquire access to it.
Driving cost into the business models of ransomware operators is one assertion of conceptual strategy. However, in as much as we are engaging technological and economic systems, we are at a more fundamental and foundational level also negotiating the physics of material and logical complexity itself. Every additional component, artefact, system or strategem hyper-inflates the (indefinitely-extensible) total entropy of the problem-space, generating non-linear effects both in and as incentives and innovations.
Shifting costs is one approach. Reconceptualisation of the global information space is another. My money is on a conceptual revolution being the key to success here.
Daedelus Kite 