The Bizarre Story of the Man Who Invented Ransomware in 1989

Slashdot reader quonset writes:To this day no one is sure why he did it, but in 1989 a Harvard-taught evolutionary biologist named Joseph Popp mailed out 20,000 floppy discs with malware on them to people around the world. At the time he was doing research into AIDS and the discs had been sent to attendees of the World Health Organization's AIDS conference in Stockholm.Eddy Willems was working for an insurance company in Belgium and his boss asked him to see what was on the disc...
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