I am not kidding or being facetious in any way.
The amount of harm this can do to an economy, is immense. Not to mention the personal harm that can be caused if someone is a patient at a hospital. Someone can die.
Here, I guess they would have to cuff them, but in some other places, I would have no problem if they went in shooting.
It is like piracy. Until we start treating them like 18th century pirates, it won’t stop and will only get worse.
And while I agree with you, our society and its attendant legal system have become so calcified with notions of “legal rights” for these out-of-country actors that we will never authorize it. People need to realize that the Constitution and Bill of Rights stops at the nation’s borders. Most of these cybercriminals operate the United States. They should be fair game.
But as I also stated, the Russians never cared for such “legalisms” and they will go kill these people if they get a chance.
The damage it can do to anyone should be sobering to all of us. I have a family friend who ignored my advice about backups and the value of a dedicated "internet surfing" computer. He got one of the latest ransomeware bugs and lost 6 months of data ("I'm too busy to do it now").
I even offered to set him up with a 2nd computer (for surfing the web) but he scoffed at me ("Too complicated!").
He's right about being too busy - what with spending all his freetime trying to recover all his stuff.
I had it get onto a computer from an email that was supposedly from the Postal Service, but wasn’t. Cost me about $180.00 to have the machine purged. Fortunately, I had backup for the compromised files or could do without them.
Moral of the story: NEVER click an attachment to an email from anyone you don’t know and trust.