Dr Joseph L Popp Jr and The First-Ever Ransomware – The AIDS Trojan
Publication: Dr. Joseph L Popp Jr and The First-Ever Ransomware – The AIDS Trojan
If you work in information security or the computer science field, there's a good chance you've heard of the first-ever ransomware – the AIDS Trojan. There's also a chance you know the basics of that story. An evolutionary biologist named Joseph Popp created it in 1989 and sent thousands of 5.25-inch floppy diskettes to AIDS researchers and magazine subscribers. The ransomware instructed victims to pay $178 or $379 to a Panamanian PO Box. He acted bizarrely before his arrest and was released back to the United States, and so on. However, I sought to change tack and go further, gathering all available artifacts and evidence from this saga to tell more of the story; effectively creating a de facto systematic literature review of the AIDS Trojan, answering the question: what motivates an evolutionary biologist to create novel malicious software, what did it do, and what impact did it have, both on its immediate victims and modern-day ransomware attacks? I didn't conceive the idea for this article out of thin air. Instead, this is an extension of my research for the AIDS Trojan entry in WatchGuard's Ransomware Tracker, linked below.
Ransomware Tracker Entry: AIDS Trojan Ransomware | WatchGuard Technologies
