Good. as someone who works in cybersecurity, I think hackers should get $0 from the victim, possibly get caught by police, and I think companies that get hacked should have to sit with their actions and DO BETTER for their customers.
If your data is in the cloud, it's probably good to have an offline backup onsite - sometimes cloud providers delete your account: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40304666
...and tested on independent infrastructure.
I worked with a financial Customer in the late 90s who, quarterly, sent a backup to an independent party for restore of the data into a freshly created application environment. They verified the backup with reproduction of key reports and random spot checks of data. It was impressive.
For absolutely business-critical data, I would consider using multiple backup approaches and/or vendors. Shout out to Tarsnap as vital here that every commercial enterprise should use for essential customer, contract, and accounting data.
The problem is, a lot of bad actors in cyberspace aren't individuals any more - Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have groups backed or outright created by the governments. There is no way to hold them accountable, three of these countries have nuclear weapons and one is only a few weeks away from building one should they decide to go for it [1]. Other cybercriminals like scam callcenters in India and Turkey have been found to bribe local governments to turn a blind eye or to warn against enforcement by federal authorities.
The only way to hold them accountable is to cut the countries off from the global communications networks so they can't do any more damage until they show credible efforts and successes in being better netizens, but we don't want to do that for a variety of "realpolitik" reasons either.
> and I think companies that get hacked should have to sit with their actions and DO BETTER for their customers.
EU GDPR has made some effort there, but in the end all software has security-critical bugs and there is only so much one can do to prevent getting hacked.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/explainer-how-clos...
They do run intel campaigns against targets or sell the tools to run such campaigns, but so does every somewhat developed nation in this world. Intelligence operations are older than the Bible, they have been a part of civilizations ever since civilizations existed as a concept.
Fundamentally the financial incentive needs to be stopped in order to curb ransomware activities.