Researchers of the company Chainanalysis, the San Diego University, the New York University Tandon school of engineering and Google have estimated that around 250 million dollars was paid as ransom by the victims of ransomware attack to the online criminals.

The as of yet unpublished research was comprised of 34 different kinds of ransomware, which gave a broad view on the consequences of these often widespread and costly attacks on unsuspecting computers.

The different kinds of ransomware can all be subcategorized into so-called ‘families’ where the sorts included in a certain family share a lot of base traits. One such ransomware ‘family’ started with the original Pater Familias called Locky. This was the first variant of ransomware that operated by keeping the infrastructure of its payment option and its encryption separate so the program could infect more computers than its competitors. The Locky ransomware was estimated at the amount of 7 million dollars paid in ransom. The similar kinds of ransomware called Cerber and CryptXXX (its ‘children’ so to speak) earned a combined amount of ransom money somewhere in the vicinity of 8.8 million dollars.

The researchers involved could get a reasonably accurate picture of the ransomware network regarding the payment via Bitcoins by following the Bitcoin-blockchains of the victim’s transactions.