Lawfare Daily: The Shadowy World of Ransomware with Professor Anja Shortland

Let's start off by asking you to tell our audience a little bit about your professional background and how you came to write Dark Screens.

My special subject at King's is economics of crime, and I'm fascinated by the governance of criminal markets.

Uh, it all started in 2010 when my four-year-old son and I got super interested in piracy off the coast of Somalia, and I started asking some really difficult questions about how do you make prices in this world? Where does the trust come from when you have a legal entity having to make a deal with a criminal group? How do you create a transaction between somebody who's just been victimized, whose salvation is gonna come from the criminals? So I've got a whole body of work around extortive crime and its governance, starting with piracy and kidnapping, um, then with art crime and artnapping and art recovery, and ransomware is the third part of my unholy trinity of extortive crime.

And I'm asking the same sort of question, who, who governs that gray space between, between ransomware groups and the businesses and individuals and governments that they victimize? Who, who makes that transaction work as well as it does? Why, why is this a business model? Why do we see brands, branded crime in this, in, in, in this, uh, space? Uh, uh, just the more you look, the more interesting it gets, and it's a really complex problem.

So in the end, the only way to tackle it was in, in book format.

And also, the book is really trying to bring out the people aspect of, of computing and engage the ordinary computer user, which means anyone who has a phone, uh, with their own cybersecurity.

Very good.