Isn't it curious that folks like kim dotcom who do not hold hospitals or anyone to ransom earn global notoriety, are raided by swat teams and face the full force of the law while those that hold hospitals to ransom can operate with impunity with people reduced to tracking their bitcoin earnings on twitter.
Is it the job of NSA and all the global security services with their overarching reach, resources and power to warn, track and disable these activities or is to spy on citizens?
Half or more of these activities are used by agencies to shut down or sabotage unfriendly interests and I suspect that's the only reason these shady figures are allowed to exist, treated with kid gloves, operate with near impunity and rarely see consequences. They serve as 'assets' to provide cover. Without consequences these activities will spiral.
Things like ddos ultimately benefit companies like cloudflare. And the preponderance of these kind of worms force people to move their data to the cloud or give up more control to large companies who promise security. This is a subtle form of extortion. We don't know the extortionists but we do know the beneficiaries.
This slowly but surely disempowers individuals and takes control away and shifts it to large companies.
Holding a hospital ransom whatever its security policies is a serious crime and treating it as just another hack rather than extreme criminality and blaming the victims is an extremely self serving technical perspective.