“This reporting would appear to raise quite significant ethical questions, and I would be concerned to think of journalists trawling through illegally-obtained deeply sensitive personal information to identify and generate stories,” he wrote. “The fact that one media source would appear to have done so may prompt others to do so – effectively creating a market for, and monetising, this very personal material,” he wrote. Brett Callow, a threat analyst with cyber-security company Emsisoft said ransomware attackers did attempt to “weaponise” the media, sometimes supplying them with leaked documents that showed victims in a bad light. The criminals' aim likely isn’t only to influence the outcome of the current incident, but to influence other incidents too, he said.