# Economic Analysis of Ransomware

## TL;DR

This paper provides an economic analysis of ransomware, exploring pricing strategies, their effectiveness, and potential future evolution to inform better countermeasures.

## Contribution

It introduces a detailed economic framework for analyzing ransomware pricing strategies and presents preliminary survey data to estimate optimal ransom values.

## Key findings

- Different pricing strategies impact ransomware success
- Optimal ransom pricing can be estimated through surveys
- Analysis of existing schemes shows potential for future evolution

## Abstract

We present in this work an economic analysis of ransomware, with relevant data from Cryptolocker, CryptoWall, TeslaCrypt and other major strands. We include a detailed study of the impact that different price discrimination strategies can have on the success of a ransomware family, examining uniform pricing, optimal price discrimination and bargaining strategies and analysing their advantages and limitations. In addition, we present results of a preliminary survey that can helps in estimating an optimal ransom value. We discuss at each stage whether the different schemes we analyse have been encountered already in existing malware, and the likelihood of them being implemented and becoming successful. We hope this work will help to gain some useful insights for predicting how ransomware may evolve in the future and be better prepared to counter its current and future threat.