US Attorney General Warns Ransomware ‘Getting Worse and Worse’/strong>
Masood Farivar, 09 June 2021
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland warned Wednesday that ransom-motivated cyberattacks are “getting worse and worse,” echoing other top Biden administration officials who have sounded the alarm about the problem in recent weeks.
“We have to do everything we possibly can here,” Garland told lawmakers. “This is a very, very serious threat.”
The attorney general’s warning during a Senate hearing on the Justice Department’s fiscal 2022 budget request followed a pair of high-profile ransomware attacks over the past month that have rattled the U.S. national security and law enforcement establishment and sparked calls for beefed-up cyber defenses.
In a ransomware attack, hackers lock a company’s or organization’s data, offering keys to unlock the files in exchange for a large sum of money.
