Latest ransomware attack may be the 'most destructive' yet

The latest in a string of ransomware attacks may be on course to become the "most destructive ... campaign that we've seen so far," writes cybersecurity expert Dmitri Alperovitch. He explained that the Friday strike against software provider Kaseya, whose customers have an untold number of clients themselves, means there could be a "huge number of victims all over the world" and "entire networks encrypted" with "no way to decrypt today without paying millions per network of any significant size" to the perpetrators, who are believed to be affiliated with cyber criminal gang REvil.

Matt Tait, a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin, said that while the fallout is "relatively small" so far, strategically speaking it may be more significant than previous, attention-grabbing attacks on Colonial Pipeline and Solar Winds.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.