It should not come as a surprise that the ransomware problem is getting worse. Although there is no precise number available – U.S. hacks could have cost more than $3 trillion over ten years!

Hackers are getting better, smarter, faster and more crafty.

One of the more ingenious moves hackers impersonating correspondence from DHS – the organization which is supposed to help stop cybersecurity. We broke the news this week of an alert they put out about the problem.

Hacking your city or company is a business to hackers – yet to most organizations, cybersecurity is an afterthought. Something you assign to the lowest bidder.

Companies then seem to be surprised when they get hit. In reality, they shouldn’t be – when you realize the scope of the problem.

To make matters worse – the U.S. is attacking Russian power plants in retaliation for them hacking those in the U.S. Russian hackers are very good and attack American companies routinely.

It is unknown if Russia will increase or decrease their hacking as a result of this new cyber cold war.

Iran too has attacked companies in the United States quite often. And that was when relations with the U.S> were relatively good. They just shot a U.S. drone out of the air last night. It doesn’t seem like they are too concerned about upsetting the U.S. at the moment.

Baltimore has had problems for months thanks to Ransomware – they were brought back to the stone ages by an attack and have lost millions because of it. The Cleveland Airport was hit and so was Altanta.

News broke this week – a Florida city agreed to pay $600,000 in ransom to hackers who took over its computer system, the latest in thousands of attacks worldwide aimed at extorting money from governments and businesses.

The Riviera Beach City Council voted unanimously this week to pay the hackers’ demands, believing the Palm Beach suburb had no choice if it wanted to retrieve its records, which the hackers encrypted. The council already voted to spend almost $1 million on new computers and hardware after hackers captured the city’s system three weeks ago.

An employee clicked on a link which caused an infection. This is a very common if not the most common way companies and governments get infected.

With all this news about hacking – it is no wonder we recently broke the news of IRONSCALES getting $15M funding to cure phishing. In addition, we broke the news Norton 360 Deluxe is now available in the Microsoft Store.

We have put together cybersecurity best practices for every organization. We urge you to read the document and live by it.

Again, every organization is a target and hacking you is very lucrative business. Plan ahead and reduce the likelihood of becoming a victim.