This is going to sound stupid, but I didn’t realise ransomware had… customers.
I always thought it was some group breaking in, encrypting stuff, demanding money. Then I saw someone casually mention they “used a service” to run an attack. Like you’d say you used Mailchimp.
Is that actually what Ransomware-as-a-Service means?
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Yeah, that’s pretty much it. And it’s weird the first time you wrap your head around it.
The people who write the ransomware usually aren’t the ones breaking into networks. They sell access to it. Someone else runs the attack. Money gets split. That’s it.
Just people doing one small piece and logging off. That’s what made it feel real to me. Nobody involved thinks they’re “the bad guy”.
What messed with me was seeing how normal the tooling looked.
I expected dark web chaos. Instead, it was dashboards, instructions, even troubleshooting. Like “if encryption fails, try this”.
At that point it stopped feeling like crime and started feeling like… operations. And honestly, some of these people aren’t even technical. They just know how to follow steps.
If you ever end up in one of the Telegram channels where this gets discussed, it feels very different from what you expect.
People ask simple questions. Others reply with fixes, links, screenshots. Someone’s always talking about payout percentages or whether a target is “worth it”.
It’s all very casual, which is probably the part that’s hardest to sit with.
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