While the last few years have seen a remarkable uptick in this particularly nasty genre of attack software, ransomware isn’t new.

Malware that holds data for ransom has been around for years. In 1991, a biologist spread PC Cyborg, the first ever ransomware, by sending floppy disks via surface mail to other AIDS researchers, for instance. In the mid ’00s Archiveus was the first ransomware to use encryption, though it’s long ago been defeated and you can find its password on its Wikipedia page.