In the last 10 months, 140 local governments, police stations and hospitals have been held hostage by ransomware attacks

The attack starts, innocently enough, with an email. But when someone clicks the link inside, hackers quickly take over. Computers at the school, hospital, or city government are locked, and the only way for employees to get back in is to pay the attacker hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin. Even then, there’s no guarantee they won’t do it again.

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