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Comment by jordanpg | Hacker News Reader

It's hard not to see this as ultimately a good thing for the world.

The market will not spend one dime more on security than is needed to maintain lines of business, and that includes things like perception of risk and mitigation.

If there is enough pain, whatever level of baseline security is needed to protect most orgs against these attacks will become the new standard.

And then this threat will be replaced by a new one.

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I dunno, when I go to Mexico I don't look at the heavily armed guards outside of a bank and go 'gee, it's a good thing there is so much violent crime here otherwise we wouldn't have these armed guards here to protect us from it'.

The internet isn't like that. You can be attacked from one individual living in a mountain in another hemisphere.

It's bad when bad things happen, no one will protect against bad things happening unless bad things happen, so it's good when bad things happen.

I see it like a vaccine. A ransomware attack is generally not as bad of a damage as a real attack. A vaccine might make you feel kind of bad, but it's not as bad as the thing it protects against.

Plus, there's other benefits. Companies might at least think a bit more about storing data about people (their employees, customers, etc) if there's a risk of it being stolen in a ransomware attack. That's a win for privacy overall.

Couldn’t disagree more. If that would happen, why hasn’t it happened yet? There are pirates and terrorists too, and they don’t make the world better or safer, quite the opposite.

I think you're hinting at a Broken Window Fallacy [1] here. I disagree that these cybercrimes are a net positive for the world.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window

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