TechCrunch
This crowdsourced payments tracker wants to solve the ransomware visibility problem
Ransomware attacks, fueled by COVID-19 pandemic turbulence, have become a major money earner for cybercriminals, with the number of attacks rising in 2020. In the last few months alone we’ve witnessed the attack on Colonial Pipeline that forced the company to shut down its systems — and the gasoline supply — to much of the eastern seaboard, the hack on meat supplier JBS that abruptly halted its slaughterhouse operations around the world, and just this month a supply chain attack on IT vendor Kaseya that saw hundreds of downstream victims locked out of their systems. Jack Cable, a security architect at Krebs Stamos Group who previously worked for the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), is looking to solve that problem with the launch of a crowdsourced ransom payments tracking website, Ransomwhere.