A "sick wannabe Blackmirror power play" is a little much.
This is probably the cheapest ransomware unlock that's ever been put out there (unless you're based in the US, then good fucking luck on the medical care clause). If you're a company whose security policies are too terrible to survive a ransomware attack, then you'd rather be hit with this one than any of the others.
Right. Picking up random children from the street and taking them to a restaurant comes at almost no cost. In fact if anyone sees this and calls the authorities they are likely to give you free lodging and food at a state owned facility top of it :)
Again, this is mostly an American problem. In other countries you know your neighbours and local community and wouldn't have a problem feeding hungry kids.
> In other countries you know your neighbours and local community and wouldn't have a problem feeding hungry kids.
This is probably only viable in smaller communities where people know one another, which may or may not show something about the authors of the malware. It's not just a social "issue", but rather one of population density, where you end up not knowing almost anyone around you personally.
Approaching random people, worse yet, kids, with promises of food in any metropolitan area or even moderately sized city would be viewed as exceedingly weird and creepy. Source: Eastern European country.
I get what the malware authors were trying to do, but it sounds like a somewhat naive and perhaps detached from reality implementation of a "sort of positive" idea.
It would have been way more viable to understand that payments for scammers work because they don't take hours or days of mucking about, but rather a payment through whatever means are available - which could also be applied to making the people affected donate to any number of charities of their or the authors' choice.
This is probably the cheapest ransomware unlock that's ever been put out there (unless you're based in the US, then good fucking luck on the medical care clause). If you're a company whose security policies are too terrible to survive a ransomware attack, then you'd rather be hit with this one than any of the others.