Well, sometimes they're right. The hit company will likely call in some consultancy to institute a bunch of newer and better security protocols, then call it a day. If they really aren't hit again for another decade and staffing a department would cost $500k a year or more, were they wrong?

It's a gamble. It's easy to point fingers at the company that was caught out, but for the hundreds or thousands that aren't ransomed and aren't paying the extra money for security, they took that gamble and so far they've come out ahead not having spent all that money on prevention.

I'm not advocating that these companies to have less security or not do better on security, but the fact is a lot of them have made the objectively correct decision for themselves, which will continue to be correct right up until they're hit, if they ever are. The whole situation is analogous to health insurance in a way, and the same incentives are at play, along with similar consequences for individual companies and all of us as a whole, as providing easy targets for these groups allows them to thrive and grow and target others.