All the competent ransomware authors are probably quite unhappy whenever a defective ransomware strain pops up.
The best way to end ransomware is to get serious about security. In many cases, being attacked by a ransomware, is paying a low price compared to if it was a targeted attack.
edit: Also, I imagine it gets easier after you wrote one i.e. many ransomewares come from the same author. So he could gain a reputation by signing messages saying that yes, this is our ransomware, we always unlock after receiving the payment.
The idea would be to create "fake" ransomware that looks exactly like the real one
>The best way to end ransomware is to get serious about security
No matter how serious you get there always gonna be bugs, there isn't a single piece of mass distributed software in human history without bugs. That said, we should try to improve security of software but expecting it to be THE solution is wrong.
>Also, I imagine it gets easier after you wrote one i.e. many ransomewares come from the same author. So he could gain a reputation by signing messages saying that yes, this is our ransomware, we always unlock after receiving the payment.
Forging a signature is not that hard.
But even without it, there are so many options, e.g. timestamp signed message on the blockchain before the release. After just one confirmed message you don't care about pretenders because people can check if the signature matches with the previous message.
I like the idea though.
All blockchain state is public, since it needs to be calculated by and verified by all nodes, so there's nowhere to stash a private key without revealing it.
> by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_exa...