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Why the ransomware crisis suddenly feels so relentless

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Why the ransomware crisis suddenly feels so relentless


Just weeks after a major American oil pipeline was struck by hackers, a cyberattack hit the world’s largest meat supplier. What next? Will these criminals target hospitals and schools? Will they start going after US cities, governments—and even the military?

In fact, all of these have been hit by ransomware already. While the onslaught we’ve seen in the last month feels new, hackers holding services hostage and demanding payments has been a huge business for years. Dozens of American cities have been disrupted by ransomware, while hospitals were hit by attacks even during the depths of the pandemic. And in 2019, the US military was targeted. But that doesn’t mean what we’re seeing now is just a matter of awareness. So what’s different now?

It’s the result of inaction

You cannot explain the metastasizing of the ransomware crisis without examining years of American inaction. The global ransomware crisis grew to incredible proportions during the Donald Trump presidency. Even as US critical infrastructure, cities, and oil pipelines were hit, the Trump administration did little to address the problem, and it went ignored by most Americans.

The ransomware boom started at the tail end of the Obama White House, which approached it as part of its overall cybercrime response. That involved putting agents on the ground around the world to score tactical wins in countries that were otherwise uncooperative, but defense against such attacks fell down the list of priorities under Trump even as ransomware itself boomed.

Today, the Biden administration is making an unprecedented attempt to tackle the problem. The White House has said that the hackers behind both the Colonial Pipeline and JBS ransomware attacks are based in Russia, and have  current efforts involving Homeland Security and the Justice Department But while President Biden plans to discuss the attacks in an upcoming summit with Vladimir Putin on June 16, the problem goes deeper than just relationships between two countries.

It’s also the result of new tactics

When the ransomware industry was taking off half a decade ago, the business model for such attacks was fundamentally different—and far simpler. Ransomware gangs started out by indiscriminately infecting vulnerable machines without much care for exactly what they were doing or who they were targeting.

Today, the operations are much more sophisticated and the payouts are much higher. Ransomware gangs now pay specialist hackers to go “big game hunting” and seek out massive targets that can pay out huge ransoms. The hackers sell the access to the gangs, who then carry out the extortion. Everyone gets paid so handsomely that it’s become increasingly irresistible—especially because the gangs typically suffer no consequences. 

There’s safe harbor for criminals

That leads to the next dimension of the problem: The hackers work from countries where they can avoid prosecution. They operate massive criminal empires and remain effectively immune to all attempts to rein them in. This is what Biden will bring up to Putin in the coming weeks. 

The problem extends beyond Russia and, to be clear, it’s not as simple as Moscow directing hackers. But the Kremlin’s tolerance of cybercriminals—and sometimes even direct cooperation with them—is a real contributor to the booming criminal industry. To change that, America and other countries will have to work together to confront nations who otherwise see no problem with US hospitals and pipelines being held for ransom. The safe harbor for cybercriminals, combined with the mostly unregulated cryptocurrency used to facilitate the crime, has made it very favorable for the hackers.

And we’re all more connected and insecure than ever

And then there is the unavoidable fact that weak cybersecurity combined with ubiquitous connectivity equals increasingly vulnerable targets. Everything in America—from our factories to our hospitals—is connected to the internet, but a lot of it is not adequately secured.  

Globally, the free market has repeatedly failed to solve some of the world’s biggest cybersecurity problems. This may be because the ransomware crisis is a problem at a scale that no private sector can solve alone.

As ransomware and cybercrime increasingly becomes a national security threat—and one that risks harming human beings, as in the case of attacks against hospitals—it’s become clear that government action is required. And so far officials from the world’s most powerful nations have chiefly succeeded in watching the disaster unfold. 

Instead, what must happen to change this is a global partnership between countries and companies to take ransomware head on. There is momentum to change the status quo, including a major recent cybersecurity executive order out of the White House. But the work is only beginning.

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The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush

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The hunter-gatherer groups at the heart of a microbiome gold rush


The first step to finding out is to catalogue what microbes we might have lost. To get as close to ancient microbiomes as possible, microbiologists have begun studying multiple Indigenous groups. Two have received the most attention: the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest and the Hadza, in northern Tanzania. 

Researchers have made some startling discoveries already. A study by Sonnenburg and his colleagues, published in July, found that the gut microbiomes of the Hadza appear to include bugs that aren’t seen elsewhere—around 20% of the microbe genomes identified had not been recorded in a global catalogue of over 200,000 such genomes. The researchers found 8.4 million protein families in the guts of the 167 Hadza people they studied. Over half of them had not previously been identified in the human gut.

Plenty of other studies published in the last decade or so have helped build a picture of how the diets and lifestyles of hunter-gatherer societies influence the microbiome, and scientists have speculated on what this means for those living in more industrialized societies. But these revelations have come at a price.

A changing way of life

The Hadza people hunt wild animals and forage for fruit and honey. “We still live the ancient way of life, with arrows and old knives,” says Mangola, who works with the Olanakwe Community Fund to support education and economic projects for the Hadza. Hunters seek out food in the bush, which might include baboons, vervet monkeys, guinea fowl, kudu, porcupines, or dik-dik. Gatherers collect fruits, vegetables, and honey.

Mangola, who has met with multiple scientists over the years and participated in many research projects, has witnessed firsthand the impact of such research on his community. Much of it has been positive. But not all researchers act thoughtfully and ethically, he says, and some have exploited or harmed the community.

One enduring problem, says Mangola, is that scientists have tended to come and study the Hadza without properly explaining their research or their results. They arrive from Europe or the US, accompanied by guides, and collect feces, blood, hair, and other biological samples. Often, the people giving up these samples don’t know what they will be used for, says Mangola. Scientists get their results and publish them without returning to share them. “You tell the world [what you’ve discovered]—why can’t you come back to Tanzania to tell the Hadza?” asks Mangola. “It would bring meaning and excitement to the community,” he says.

Some scientists have talked about the Hadza as if they were living fossils, says Alyssa Crittenden, a nutritional anthropologist and biologist at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who has been studying and working with the Hadza for the last two decades.

The Hadza have been described as being “locked in time,” she adds, but characterizations like that don’t reflect reality. She has made many trips to Tanzania and seen for herself how life has changed. Tourists flock to the region. Roads have been built. Charities have helped the Hadza secure land rights. Mangola went abroad for his education: he has a law degree and a master’s from the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona.

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The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan

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The Download: a microbiome gold rush, and Eric Schmidt’s election misinformation plan


Over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important the microbes that crawl all over us are to our health. But some believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.

Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost. 

But there is a major catch: we don’t know whether those in hunter-gatherer societies really do have “healthier” microbiomes—and if they do, whether the benefits could be shared with others. At the same time, members of the communities being studied are concerned about the risk of what’s called biopiracy—taking natural resources from poorer countries for the benefit of wealthier ones. Read the full story.

—Jessica Hamzelou

Eric Schmidt has a 6-point plan for fighting election misinformation

—by Eric Schmidt, formerly the CEO of Google, and current cofounder of philanthropic initiative Schmidt Futures

The coming year will be one of seismic political shifts. Over 4 billion people will head to the polls in countries including the United States, Taiwan, India, and Indonesia, making 2024 the biggest election year in history.

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Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI

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Navigating a shifting customer-engagement landscape with generative AI


A strategic imperative

Generative AI’s ability to harness customer data in a highly sophisticated manner means enterprises are accelerating plans to invest in and leverage the technology’s capabilities. In a study titled “The Future of Enterprise Data & AI,” Corinium Intelligence and WNS Triange surveyed 100 global C-suite leaders and decision-makers specializing in AI, analytics, and data. Seventy-six percent of the respondents said that their organizations are already using or planning to use generative AI.

According to McKinsey, while generative AI will affect most business functions, “four of them will likely account for 75% of the total annual value it can deliver.” Among these are marketing and sales and customer operations. Yet, despite the technology’s benefits, many leaders are unsure about the right approach to take and mindful of the risks associated with large investments.

Mapping out a generative AI pathway

One of the first challenges organizations need to overcome is senior leadership alignment. “You need the necessary strategy; you need the ability to have the necessary buy-in of people,” says Ayer. “You need to make sure that you’ve got the right use case and business case for each one of them.” In other words, a clearly defined roadmap and precise business objectives are as crucial as understanding whether a process is amenable to the use of generative AI.

The implementation of a generative AI strategy can take time. According to Ayer, business leaders should maintain a realistic perspective on the duration required for formulating a strategy, conduct necessary training across various teams and functions, and identify the areas of value addition. And for any generative AI deployment to work seamlessly, the right data ecosystems must be in place.

Ayer cites WNS Triange’s collaboration with an insurer to create a claims process by leveraging generative AI. Thanks to the new technology, the insurer can immediately assess the severity of a vehicle’s damage from an accident and make a claims recommendation based on the unstructured data provided by the client. “Because this can be immediately assessed by a surveyor and they can reach a recommendation quickly, this instantly improves the insurer’s ability to satisfy their policyholders and reduce the claims processing time,” Ayer explains.

All that, however, would not be possible without data on past claims history, repair costs, transaction data, and other necessary data sets to extract clear value from generative AI analysis. “Be very clear about data sufficiency. Don’t jump into a program where eventually you realize you don’t have the necessary data,” Ayer says.

The benefits of third-party experience

Enterprises are increasingly aware that they must embrace generative AI, but knowing where to begin is another thing. “You start off wanting to make sure you don’t repeat mistakes other people have made,” says Ayer. An external provider can help organizations avoid those mistakes and leverage best practices and frameworks for testing and defining explainability and benchmarks for return on investment (ROI).

Using pre-built solutions by external partners can expedite time to market and increase a generative AI program’s value. These solutions can harness pre-built industry-specific generative AI platforms to accelerate deployment. “Generative AI programs can be extremely complicated,” Ayer points out. “There are a lot of infrastructure requirements, touch points with customers, and internal regulations. Organizations will also have to consider using pre-built solutions to accelerate speed to value. Third-party service providers bring the expertise of having an integrated approach to all these elements.”

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