ABSTRACT
Introduction In 1989, the digital world was introduced to the PC Cyborg trojan horse (also known as the “AIDS” trojan), an impending game-changer in the cybercrime landscape. What later became known as a class of malware called ransomware, PC Cyborg was created by a biologist, Dr. Joseph Popp, who provided HIV/AIDS patients with infected floppy disks labeled “AIDS Information – Introductory Diskettes” (Kassner, 2010; Smith, 2002). Whenever PC Cyborg entered a system, it tracked the number of system boots until a threshold was met (typically 90 times), at which point it would hide and encrypt the names of all files and directories in the local drive of the infected system. PC Cyborg then prompted victims, whose computers were no longer operational, to send $189 to the PC Cyborg Corporation in order for the files to be decrypted and the computer to be reverted back to its working state.
