Last spring, a Baltimore underwent a grinding, long-term government shutdown after the city's systems were hijacked by ransomware. This was exacerbated by massive administrative incompetence: the city had not allocated funds for improved security, training or cyberinsurance, despite having had its emergency services network taken over by ransomware the previous hear, and five city CIOs had departed in the previous four years either through firings or forced resignations. Read the rest

Petya is a well-known ransomware app that has attained a new, deadly virulence, with thousands of new infection attempts hitting Kaspersky Lab's honeypots; security firm Avira attributes this new hardiness to the incorporation of EternalBlue -- the same NSA cyberweapon that the Wannacry ransomware used, which was published by The Shadow Brokers hacker group -- into a new Petya strain. Read the rest