The Ethics of Ransomware
It was Joseph Tainter who warned that the more complex our society becomes, the more vulnerable we are. This became painfully obvious when hundreds of thousands of ransomware victims around the world faced the prospect of having to pay extortion money to get back the use of their own computers.
Some of the victims were corporations. But others were hospitals, whose patients lives were endangered by the virus that crippled emergency and diagnostic equipment.
This raises all kinds of ethical questions: