India, April 5 -- The world's first piece of ransomware was created in 1989, by evolutionary biologist Joseph L Popp Jr, a 39-year-old who had been working part-time for the World Health Organization. At some point, possibly because he was denied a permanent position, he devised his scheme. He duplicated a questionnaire on 20,000 floppy discs and dispatched them by post to WHO researchers across 90 countries. Each disc contained a Trojan virus. Inserted into a computer, the malware made the device unusable until a "licence fee" of $189 had been sent, in cash or cashier's cheque, to a post-office box in Panama. The damage was sweeping. While some recipients were able to un-hack their computers themselves, others lost all the work on their de...