How to trade your $214,000 cybersecurity job for a jail cell

Helping companies pay ransoms to digital extortionists is kind of an odd business.

On the one hand, you “negotiate” with cybercriminals and in so doing may drive down the costs of recovering from a particular ransomware incident. On the other hand, you’re helping criminals get paid, funding their operations and making further attacks more likely.

And there’s always a temptation built into this kind of work. Seeing lucrative sums being whisked away through cryptocurrency exchanges and “mixing services”… Realizing from up close just how vulnerable companies are… Learning that modern ransomware can operate as a service where you essentially “rent” the code from its developers in return for a cut of the profits…

One day, you might wake up on the wrong side of the bed and ask yourself: “Why shouldn’t this money I’m directing to other criminals go to me, a far more worthy criminal, instead?”

According to the FBI, this was what happened to three US-based cybersecurity professionals who went rogue over the last two years, planting their own malware into US-based businesses and reaping the sweet but illicit rewards.

(Well—reward, actually. It turns out that extorting doctors’ offices and local manufacturing firms is more difficult than it looks. But more on that in a minute.)

Of course, you do have to worry about when the FBI will kick in your door and you will end up (as one person in this story did) lamenting your choices to the very people with guns who are trying to take you down, blathering on about going to federal prison for the rest of your life, then buying one-way tickets to Paris and ending up in a cell.

Pretty soon, your whole life has been upended.

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Kevin Martin worked as a ransomware negotiator for DigitalMint, a Chicago company that says it can help with “evaluating demands, sourcing legitimate cryptocurrency, and facilitating secure transactions to minimize financial impact and meet threat actor requirements quickly” after an attack.