The new digital extortion

Axios: “If you run a hospital, a bank, a utility or a city, chances are you’ll be hit with a ransomware attack. Given the choice between losing your precious data or paying up, chances are you’ll pay.

• Why it matters: Paying the hackers is the clear short-term answer for most organizations hit with these devastating attacks, but it’s a long-term societal disaster, encouraging hackers to continue their lucrative extortion schemes.
• Driving the news: Colonial Pipeline paid hackers almost $5 million in ransom to restore its systems and get gasoline flowing again after a ransomware attack held the country’s largest pipeline hostage, which resulted in widespread disruption of gasoline supply.
• The big picture: “This creates a collective action problem — the bad guys win so they’ll go out and hit someone else,” said Betsy Cooper, director of Aspen Tech Policy Hub at the Aspen Institute…”