Ransom War: How Cyber Crime Became a Threat to National Security

One of the most pernicious types of cyberattacks involves hackers gaining control of vital files and systems and then demanding a ransom from their owners. Smeets opens this revealing and disturbing book with a ransom attack by Conti, a criminal group, against Costa Rican government websites in the spring of 2022. The country’s president declared it an act of war. Conti had connections to the Russian state; following Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a Ukrainian civilian gained access to Conti’s files and leaked them into the public domain. In part because of the leaks, Conti then fragmented. Smeets uses this uncovered material about all aspects of the group’s activities, much of it extremely technical, to support his analysis. His close examination of the internal workings of Conti reveals the group’s dysfunctions and tensions among the leadership. As with other coercive activities, extracting ransoms requires establishing trust and credibility with potential targets—no easy task for a criminal organization.