Questões sobre Interpretação de texto | Reading comprehension

   The story of the ransomware surge is the story of the discovery, professionalization, and growth of the targeted attack extortion model. Prior to 2016, most ransomware campaigns targeted a large and effectively random pool of end users. This “spray-and-pray” business model privileged quantity over quality, meaning ransomware actors spent less time focusing on how to apply pressure on a given victim and more time trying to reach as many victims as possible. Until the tail end of this period, ransomware did not generate enormous profits. Being a secondtier avenue of cybercrime, it failed to attract as much talent or activity as it would in the years to come.

   Ransomware experienced its first period of significant growth between 2013 and 2016, when refinements to ransomware payloads, the emergence of virtual currencies, and enhanced anti-fraud measures from banks and cybersecurity vendors increased the profitability of digital extortion relative to other common avenues of cybercrime. What happened next remains unclear, but with more activity concentrating on ransomware, criminals appear to have learned how easy it was to extort organizations before piecing together how lucrative these attacks could be. Regardless, between 2016 and 2019, established cybercriminal gangs entered the targeted ransomware business en masse.

   From that point until the summer of 2021, cybercriminals invested growing time and resources to improve the targeted extortion model. During this period, digital extortion became more profitable because cybercriminal gangs and cybercrime markets reoriented around a near limitless demand for targeted ransomware. Moreover, as criminals learned how to best extract revenue from victims, they launched increasingly disruptive ransomware attacks.

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   Even though it is tempting to hope that we are just one diplomatic agreement, one technological leap, or one regulation away from its elimination, targeted ransomware is here to stay. As with other forms of crime, the government can expect better outcomes by planning how to manage the issue over time rather than searching for quick and complete solutions.

Adapted from: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wpcontent/uploads/2022/08/Behind_the_rise_of_ransomware.pdf

  The data harvested from our personal devices, along with our trail of electronic transactions and data from other sources, now provides the foundation for some of the world’s largest companies. […] For the past two decades, the commercial use of personal data has grown in wild-west fashion. But now, because of consumer mistrust, government actions, and competition for customers, those days are quickly coming to an end.

   For most of its existence, the data economy was structured around a “digital curtain” designed to obscure the industry’s practices from lawmakers and the public. Data was considered company property and a proprietary secret, even though the data originated from customers’ private behavior. That curtain has since been lifted and a convergence of consumer, government, and market forces are now giving users more control over the data they generate. Instead of serving as a resource that can be freely harvested, countries in every region of the world have begun to treat personal data as an asset owned by individuals and held in trust by firms.

   This will be a far better organizing principle for the data economy. Giving individuals more control has the potential to curtail the sector’s worst excesses while generating a new wave of customer-driven innovation, as customers begin to express what sort of personalization and opportunity they want their data to enable. And while Adtech firms in particular will be hardest hit, any firm with substantial troves of customer data will have to make sweeping changes to its practices, particularly large firms such as financial institutions, healthcare firms, utilities, and major manufacturers and retailers.

  Leading firms are already adapting to the new reality as it unfolds. The key to this transition — based upon our research on data and trust, and our experience working on this issue with a wide variety of firms— is for companies to reorganize their data operations around the new fundamental rules of consent, insight, and flow.

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   Federal lawmakers are moving to curtail the power of big tech. Meanwhile, in 2021 state legislatures proposed or passed at least 27 online privacy bills regulating data markets and protecting personal digital rights. Lawmakers from California to China are implementing legislation that mirrors Europe’s GDPR, while the EU itself has turned its attention to regulating the use of AI. Where once companies were always ahead of regulators, now they struggle to keep up with compliance requirements across multiple jurisdictions.

Adapted from: https://hbr.org/2022/02/the-new-rules-of-data-privacy February 25, 2022 – Retrieved September 6, 2022