If you ask the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology (ICIT), this is the year when "ransomware will wreak havoc on America's critical infrastructure community," including financial services.
Ransomware basically locks the data on a computer — or the computer itself, or even an entire system or network — so that users cannot gain access to data or processes; it then holds the system and its data hostage, or even threatens destruction of the data, until the system's owner pays a ransom for its release. The recent decision by Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center to pay hackers $17,000 in bitcoin to release its entire digital network has highlighted just one of the dangers posed by such threats.
In the ICIT Ransomware Report, provocatively titled "2016 Will Be the Year Ransomware Holds America Hostage," the authors lay out the threat posed by this rising form of hacking, which "is less about technological sophistication and more about exploitation of the human element."
|Malware installation
Ransomware can arrive on a computer system the same way other malware does, but ransomware threat actors — those who hold the data hostage — aren't usually able to breach systems themselves. Instead they rely on a variety of methods to get their malware onto the systems they deem ripe for plucking.
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