Re: Govt could help here.
"I do wish that Govt would do something useful and make paying ransoms illegal - if nobody had a choice of paying them them then they'd stop fairly quickly. (Other scams would appear instead though.)"
Apart from the fact you wouldn't be able to know who paid and wouldn't be able to catch them, I'm not entirely sure this would be desirable.
Some people are really in shit due to potential loss of data and giving a recovery option is entirely good.
