Lawfare Daily: The Shadowy World of Ransomware with Professor Anja Shortland
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2026
⏱️ 34 minutes
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Summary
Lawfare Book Review Editor Jonathan Cedarbaum sits down with Anja Shortland, professor of political economy at King's College London, to discuss her new book, "Dark Screens: Hackers and Heroes in the Shadowy World of Ransomware." The book offers a history of the development of ransomware into perhaps the most important form of cyber crime, costing the global economy $75 billion a year. In the book, Shortland depicts the evolving strategies of ransomware organizations and the efforts by governments and corporations to defend themselves from this often crippling type of cyber attack.
Shortland and Cedarbaum talk about the emergence of organized criminal groups specializing in digital extortion over the past 15 years, some of their most spectacular hacks, how target organizations have worked to make themselves more resilient to ransomware attacks, and how governments have sought to disrupt ransomware groups.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The second generation of ransomware is human operator, so not the sort of commodity automated ransomware, |
| 0:10.0 | but human operated where people take charge of targeting, offsetting a ransom, maybe investigating how much the victim is worth, |
| 0:20.0 | how much they might be able to pay, |
| 0:22.3 | they might have investigated their profit and loss accounts as they're in the service anywhere, |
| 0:27.0 | they might even have found an insurance certificate. |
| 0:30.1 | It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Jonathan Cedarbaum, book review editor at Lawfare, |
| 0:35.5 | with Professor Anya Shortland, who is a professor of political |
| 0:40.0 | economy at King's College London. |
| 0:42.6 | Saying, oh, well, just let's take the profit motive out of it that never worked because, |
| 0:49.7 | in the end, if their lives at risk or livelihoods at risk and the company is hemorrhaging money. |
| 0:58.1 | The commitment to saying he will never pay ransoms is just not credible. |
| 1:02.9 | Today, we're talking about her book, Dark Screens, Hackers and Heroes in the shadowy world of ransomware. |
| 1:11.2 | Let's start off by asking you to tell our audience a little bit about your professional |
| 1:15.8 | background and how you came to write dark screens. |
| 1:19.8 | My special subject at King's is economics of crime, and I'm fascinated by the governance |
| 1:27.3 | of criminal markets. It all started in 2010 when my |
| 1:32.8 | four-year-old son and I got super interested in piracy off the coast of Somalia and I. I started |
| 1:40.6 | asking some really difficult questions about how do you make prices in this world? |
| 1:47.1 | Where does the trust come from when you have a legal entity having to make a deal with a criminal group? |
| 1:55.3 | How do you create a transaction between somebody who's just been victimized, whose salvation is going to come from the criminals. |
| 2:04.6 | So I've got a whole body of work around extortive crime and its governance, starting with piracy and kidnapping, |
| 2:13.6 | and then with art crime and art napping and art recovery. |
... |
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