The Ransomware Decade: The Creation of a Fine-Grained Dataset and a Longitudinal Study

Armin Sarabi, Ziyuan Huang, Chenlan Wang, Tai Karir, Mingyan Liu

34th USENIX Security Symposium · Day 1

This comprehensive paper, "The Ransomware Decade: The Creation of a Fine-Grained Dataset and a Longitudinal Study," presents an in-depth analysis of the evolving ransomware landscape over the past ten years. Authored by a team from the University of Michigan, the research addresses a critical gap in the cybersecurity community: the lack of a systematic, long-range, and finely annotated dataset of ransomware incidents. By developing a novel, chatbot-aided methodology to extract detailed information from public reports, the authors have created a unique resource that enables a granular understanding of ransomware's prevalence, impact, and the dynamics between attackers and victims.

AI review

Solid empirical work that finally gives the field a longitudinal ransomware dataset with actual structure. The chatbot-aided extraction pipeline is the real contribution here—96.7% end-to-end accuracy on messy news articles is genuinely useful. Some of the causal claims are weaker than the descriptive stats, but this is the kind of infrastructure paper that enables better research downstream.