Jamie MacColl

Commenting on RUSI’s contribution to the Counter Ransomware Initiative, Jamie MacColl, RUSI Research Fellow, said: "Ransomware is one the most intractable cyber policy challenges facing the UK and other countries. The CRI is a unique forum for countries – and now industry and civil society – to come together and develop responses to ransomware."

For all the prominence of ransomware and the chaos left in its wake, most conversations around attacks tend to focus on the financial damage. Companies have blamed ransomware for insolvencies, while the global financial cost of ransomware attacks totals hundreds of billions of pounds. But there is another, less frequently discussed cost: the huge emotional and physical toll on the people left dealing with the aftermath of attacks. Two new reports, The Ransomware Victim Experience from defence thinktank RUSI and an accompanying academic article for the Journal of Cybersecurity, outline just how devastating these attacks are to victims’ health and wellbeing.

Research fellow at defence thinktank RUSI, Jamie Maccoll, says mandatory reporting of ransomware will be particularly useful to better understand the cybercrime landscape in the UK. “At the moment, we know cybercrime is a really big issue, but we don’t know the scale of it or the true cost of it to the UK, which makes it hard to design effective policy,” Maccoll says.