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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep‎. Consensus is that sources have been found to establish notability. Other questions about whether to merge similar topics have not been resolved but may be addressed outside of this AfD. Malinaccier (talk) 17:47, 21 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Cryptovirology[edit]

AfDs for this article:

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Cryptovirology (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log | edits since nomination)
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This seems to be something coined by A. Young, and was not adopted in the wider world. Other sources such as Scientific American and the NIST do not mention the word. Also, COI editing is involved here: Special:Contributions/Adamlucasyoung. PhotographyEdits (talk) 11:48, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Keep I stand corrected, Gscholar has many papers using the term and it's been in use since the 1990's [2], [3] and [4]. Oaktree b (talk) 14:01, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
[2] is a paper by the person who coined the term originally, and so is [4]. Leaves [3], which is not enough. PhotographyEdits (talk) 14:30, 7 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Keep @Oaktree b got one that passed the nominator's litmus test but there plenty are more. For example:
There are 684 855 hits on Google Scholar for this term, only a few of which are by Young. Yes, many are not RS but these would have been found on the most minimal WP:BEFORE search. If @PhotographyEdits still feels this term has not been "adopted in the wider world" then I think it would be incumbent on them to explain what efforts they made to exclude the possibility the google scholar results contain less than two reliable sources with significant coverage of the term. Oblivy (talk) 07:06, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The number of passing mentions does not mean it passes the WP:GNG.
Quite a lot of them are citogenesis, because the cryptovirology word has been included for a long time in the first sentence of the ransomware article. A whole lot are just returning a hit because they cite the original paper by A. Young but do not add anything about the term. PhotographyEdits (talk) 12:52, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Did you consider the Bhardwaj & Das book chapter? It is literally about cryptivirology ("the study in this chapter deals with the dynamics of worm propagation in cryptovirol-
ogy"). Is that a passing mention?
I don't understand this: Quite a lot of them are citogenesis, because the cryptovirology word has been included for a long time in the first sentence of the ransomware article. Can you explain? Note that when "a whole lot" of papers cite a paper about a concept that can be evidence of notability.
Can you confirm you did a WP:BEFORE search that included Google Scholar? Your nomination statement only talked about existing sources and I think disregarding hundreds of hits would generate some explanation. Oblivy (talk) 13:06, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
>Can you confirm you did a WP:BEFORE search that included Google Scholar?
Yes, I did.
Please also see my comment below.
The ransomware article weirdly states it is part of a larger field called cryptovirology, while this does not seem to be the case. PhotographyEdits (talk) 07:47, 10 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Years later, the media relabeled the cryptoviral extortion attack as ransomware."
Therefore, this article should be a redirect to ransomware article. The term should only be mentioned in the early history of ransomware. Also, meeting WP:GNG does not mean the subject is required to have an article. We can merge an outdated term into the article with the common name.
PhotographyEdits (talk) 19:50, 8 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: It seems we are heading toward a consensus to keep the article, but could we evaluate the nominators thought that this should be merged with ransomware? It's not clear whether this is quite right as Cryptovirology looks like the study of ransomware and similar methods. Pinging @Oaktree b: @Artem.G: @Oblivy: any thoughts?
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Malinaccier (talk) 13:56, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Comment: It looks like cryptovirology is essentially "the use of cryptography in viruses." It looks like it's mostly ransomeware encrypting data, but according to the article it's also about things like publishing user data in encrypted form to be found by virus makers, and also asymmetric backdoors. So if the article was to be merged it would have to be merged into multiple articles.
  • Ransomware seems to have pretty good coverage of encryption usage
  • Backdoor (computing) has a section on asymmetric backdoors that references essentially the same things as the cryptovirology article
  • Private information retrieval is something the article claims is a theoretical use of cryptography in viruses
  • The rest (the article mentions viruses communicating with cryptography, and "cryptographic counters") would have to go into Computer virus
So the real question is probably whether the use of cryptography in viruses is well-covered enough that it needs its own article. Mrfoogles (talk) 15:02, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's also Kleptography, which may get its own AFD if this one succeeds but could be a merge target. One of the books mentioned above distinguishes cryptovirology into "active" and "passive", where active is essentially ransomware and passive is essentially the kleptography article, so by that definition we would have it covered. The one thing missing is cryptographical virus communication, but that's not discussed in the article other than a trivial mention, so there would be nothing to merge. Mrfoogles (talk) 15:07, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
> So the real question is probably whether the use of cryptography in viruses is well-covered enough that it needs its own article.
My answer to this is a pretty clear 'no'. Also, all the articles you linked is pretty much industry standard terminlogy, while this really is not. My vote is either 'delete' or 'merge and redirect'. Ransomware seems like the best merge target. I might open an AfD to Kleptography as well soon. PhotographyEdits (talk) 14:01, 19 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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