Welcome to Kernel Panic, a weekly newsletter by Lily Hay Newman and Matt Burgess from inside the new world of privacy and digital security. To receive this newsletter in your inbox each week, sign up here.
With so much going on all the time, you may not have thought about ransomware and data extortion attacks in a minute, even though they’ve been among the the biggest cybersecurity threats to institutions—and, by extension, people—over the past decade. But in the new era of AI-powered and automated cyberattacks, the danger posed by ransomware is only increasing as cybercriminals profit by combining established methods with new techniques made possible or more accessible by AI.
