Compendium of Transnational Public-Private Partnerships Against Ransomware

Over the past decade, ransomware has emerged as a prominent component of the global cyber threat landscape. As a global phenomenon, the ransomware threat spares no industry or region across the world and relies on a complex ecosystem. The dynamics thus reinforce the need to achieve effective cooperation and common understanding between private and public actors. Starting from this premise, the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace has launched a workstream aimed at informing the intergovernmental work of the Working Group n°3 of the Counter Ransomware Initiative by providing a global, multistakeholder lens. This workstream brought together representatives from the public sector, industry and civil society for a round of discussions initiated in mid-2022, where participants agreed on the drafting of the present compendium of existing global initiatives aimed at fighting ransomware threats through PPP (Public-Private Partnerships) cooperative models.

This compendium is aimed as a resource to gain a better appreciation of the global state of play regarding public-private partnerships in the fight against ransomware. Such work is a precondition for identifying gaps and contemplating potential synergies in this field. The collection of information was facilitated by the sound expertise and experience of the participants in global public-private partnerships against ransomware, both at the national and supranational level.

The compendium has been divided in three sections to give a comprehensive and integrative overview of existing initiatives, following a finalist approach which focuses on main purposes and outputs of included initiatives – which are most of the time in line with the core mandate of the public organizations involved in the partnership:

I) Policy and Strategy
II) Law Enforcement Cooperation
III) User Empowerment

The initiatives were then classified according to their geographic scope – global or regional – considering the number of initiatives hosted by regional public organizations. The existence of many regional PPPs may suggest, beyond an opportunistic dimension, that many stakeholders adhere to the idea that certain local dynamics should be the object of actions with a narrower scope, in parallel or even in collaboration with global initiatives

The number of initiatives identified in this compendium shows a clear endorsement by the cyber community of the relevance of public-private partnerships the global threat of ransomware. The outcomes of the above-mentioned initiatives can only strengthen this argument. However, this finding does not imply that existing transnational PPPs have achieved optimal cooperation and efficiency to date.