Kurtis Minder got into the ransomware negotiation business by accident early last year.
The startup he co-founded, GroupSense Inc., monitors dark web forums and chat groups to see when hackers sell access to businesses’ computer networks. After Mr. Minder’s firm told a software company that criminals appeared to have targeted it, the company asked GroupSense to talk down the attackers from an initial demand of more than $1 million to unlock internal data they had encrypted with ransomware. The two sides settled on a roughly…
