华尔街日报 The Wall Street Journal 2021年5月12日英文版 PDF电子版百度网盘下载

华尔街日报 The Wall Street Journal 2021年5月12日英文版 PDF电子版百度网盘下载-八点一刻

截取其中一篇文章内容：

As Ransomware Attacks Rise,
Consequences Get More Severe

The cyberattack that
knocked offline an essential
gasoline pipeline shows how
the dangerous, professional-
scale hack-for-ransom threat
is spreading rapidly, targeting
companies, schools, hospitals
and other U.S. institutions.
While ransomware has long
been a challenge for small
businesses, a confluence of
factors has emboldened at-
tackers in the past year, cul-
By Robert McMillan,
Dustin Volz
and Tawnell D. Hobbs
minating in Friday’s shutdown
of a critical gasoline pipeline
to the U.S. East Coast. The
pipeline’s operator, Colonial
Pipeline Co., has said service
could be offline until week’s
end, threatening to raise
prices at the pump for mil-
lions of people.
Attacks are growing in
number and scale as millions
of people across the country
work or attend school re-
motely, in some cases opening
back doors to networks with-
out corporate or institutional
security protections, security
researchers said.
Hackers have grown adept
at communicating about vul-
nerabilities on the so-called
Dark Web, a network of com-
puters that can share informa-
tion anonymously. The ability
to demand payment in crypto-
currency limits law-enforce-
ment tracking. And the growth
in insurance policies that
cover ransomware payments
has helped seed an increas-
ingly professionalized ransom-
ware industry.
Senior officials in the Biden
administration have said that
on its current trajectory, the
problem will only get worse. A
senior Justice Department of-
ficial likened the phenomenon
to “cyber weapons of mass de-
struction.”
There is no official U.S.
clearinghouse to track ran-
somware cases, but nearly
2,500 were reported to the
Federal Bureau of Investiga-
tion last year, an increase of
66% from 2019.
While precise data on at-
tacks are often difficult to
come by, partly due to the de-
sire for secrecy among both
perpetrators and victims, ran-
somware victims paid hackers
Please turn to page A5