I can see why someone may think that, but there was an aspect to the interview, that was cut out. I used to live in one of the big German Baltic Sea harbour cities. The local shipyard was/is essentially a money laundering operation for the Russian mob. So obviously, when I started to get threats from Russian groups, in particular, that makes you feel rather uneasy. Especially given that ransomware campaigns often have trouble turning the bitcoins back into "clean" money and the go-to people for money laundering in the former USSR regions is the Russian mafia.

People are also not aware of Germany's mandatory IDs and registrations. Essentially, if you want someone's address, you can go to the local municipality. As long as you provide enough information that allows them to uniquely identify a person in their records, you can obtain their address for a small fee (~$10). If you can make a valid claim (like they owe you money), you can get a lot more information than that. The amount of information you need to provide varies a bit. But usually, the full name is enough, provided there isn't another person with the same name in the same region. In that case, you may have to add in the birthday or an old address as well.

So yeah, not really xenophobia. Just the local organised crime in the area I used to live with given with the fact that the groups with the most credible threats were from former USSR countries.

Obviously, I can't crack all ransomware out there and I never made that claim (and neither made the article). However, a lot of ransomware has flaws that can be abused just like a lot of other software has bad crypto. The flaws are usually just what you would also find in production code: Bad key generation, improper key sizes, inappropriate key re-use, server vulnerabilities.

There are also some real "WTF?!" moments as well. For example, the first iterations of Cryptowall left the generated private key on the system by accident, because they copied sample code on how to use the CryptoAPI from the MSDN documentation without understanding what some of the parameters meant. Cryptowall later went on to become one of the most profitable ransomware campaigns in history with estimated revenues within the 300 million US dollar range. Bottom line is: As with many things, ransomware doesn't have to be perfect to cause a lot of damage.

You can obviously dismiss it as a "guy cracked a couple crappy tools", but ultimately we broke over hundreds of different ransomware families and major revisions within said families.