Transparency is crucially needed in assessing the spread of ransomware and the efficacy of mitigations. Fortunately, due to the transparent nature of Bitcoin, it's easy to track payments with knowledge of receipt addresses. By crowdsourcing ransomware payment addresses, we hope to provide an open resource for the security community and the public.
As Ransomwhere is new, we are still working on building out our dataset. Reports have placed total ransomware revenue in 2020 at up to $350 million.
While it's impossible to verify with complete certainty that a report is accurate, we aim to utilize the wisdom of the crowds to prevent abuse. All reports are required to include a screenshot of the ransomware payment demand, and will be reviewed before being displayed. Addresses with more than one report from different sources will be given priority, and all elements of all reports will be publicly available. We will remove reports if we believe they are untruthful.
Dollar values are calculated using the bitcoin exchange rate the day that the transaction was sent. As a result, they serve as an approximate measure but are not necessarily the exact amount the criminals sold the bitcoin for.