Free software for hire, done the other way around.

Imagine the community has hired you to code something. Write it. Announce a ransom price based on the value of the labor you put into it. Sell closed-source shareware or something. When your gross profit adds up to the ransom, the community has paid you for your work, so free the source. Be fair, use a license that allows derived works as ransomware.

I hope this will work, but I haven't had copious free time to try it yet.

Ransomware is malicious software, usually delivered as a trojan attachment via an e-mail, that automatically encrypts files on an infected computer. The owner of the computer is then informed that their files can only be accessed again with a decryption code that the programmer of the ransomware will provide, for a price.

One example is Trojan.Gpcoder, a 56k trojan horse which is loaded onto a platform thanks to the Internet Explorer vulnerability MS04-023. It then searches for files with various extensions (including word documents, photos, databases, Zip files and spreadsheets) and encodes them. The original files are deleted, and the user is sent a message through a pop up stating how their files can be recovered. Trojan.Gpcoder is also known as Virus.Win32.Gpcode.b, PGPcoder and TROJ_PGPCODER.A, and has been identified by the software security providers Kaspersky Lab, McAfee and Trend Micro.

Incidents of ransomware are relatively few. In one instance a criminal group possibly originating from Eastern Europe were extorting $200 payments from their victims.

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