I bet the malware author is really regretting not translating the ransom note and payment instructions into multiple languages now.
EDIT: Sorry, my mistake. It's already in 28 languages, like the posters below pointed out. I only ever saw the English screenshot and made the incorrect assumption.
Why are these orders of magnitude more profitable than WannaCrypt? More computers infected? Bigger percentage of targets paying the ransom? Larger ransom amounts? Something else?
People have started taking better backups, now they have the option to restore, plus it's too big, the UK government is never going to pay $300 per computer when you may have 10,000 computers locked up. When you get a small firm with 5 pcs and the cost is $1500 it's a cheap lesson so you pay up.
Why would it be? Usually Ransomware has a unique btc address per infection (per machine) so the decryption key is linked to the payment, that doesn't seem to be the case with this malware.
Maybe 'cause it wasn't a commercial operation, but a "retaliation at a time and place of our own choosing" that spread outside Russia before the killswitch could be hit via their cutout.
$60K so far, and a lot of people are still probably figuring out how to get Bitcoin. If they had reasonable opsec in making/distributing it and act a bit careful in cashing out the coins they're probably OK. If they end up collecting $200K or so, and Bitcoin continues to go up and they live in a cheap country ... could be well worth it.
The attackers can run their bitcoins through a "bitcoin mixer". But those mixers may have been penetrated by an intelligence agency.
It doesn't matter which one; all the major powers are annoyed with this attacker.
Yeah we can just imagine the scene in a movie: dude lives like a poor hermit for five years, carefully mixing those BTC, and then when he flies to Vietnam and buys a nice boat, drives a few miles offshore, then he finds a pissed-off assassin who kills him in some painful fashion just for "being an asshole for taking so long to surface".
EDIT: Sorry, my mistake. It's already in 28 languages, like the posters below pointed out. I only ever saw the English screenshot and made the incorrect assumption.