Tag Archives: Ransomware

More interesting cybersecurity journalism (finally)

A study (PDF) by a team led by Sean Aday at the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs (commissioned by the Hewlett Foundation) sheds light on the improving quality of the coverage of cybersecurity incidents in mainstream US media. Ever since 2014, cyber stories in the news have been moving steadily away from the sensationalist hack-and-attack template of yore toward a more nuanced description of the context, the constraints of the cyber ecosystem, the various actors’ motivations, and the impactof incidents on the everyday lives of ordinary citizens.

The report shows how an understanding of the mainstream importance of cyber events has progressively percolated into newsrooms across the country over the past half-decade, leading to a broader recognition of the substantive issues at play in this field. An interesting incidental finding is that, over the course of this same period of time, coverage of the cyber beat has focused critical attention not only on the ‘usual suspects’ (Russia, China, shadowy hacker groups) but also, increasingly, on big tech companies themselves: an aspect of this growing sophistication of coverage is a foregrounding of the crucial role platform companies play as gatekeepers of our digital lives.

Trust among thieves

An item that recently appeared on NBC News (via /.) graphically illustrates the pervasiveness of the problem of trust across organizations, cultures, and value systems. It also speaks to the routinization of ransomware extortion and other forms of cybercrime as none-too-glamorous career paths, engendering their own disgruntled and underpaid line workers.

Enforcement as deflection

Technology policy is often characterized as an area in which governments play catch-up, both cognitively and resource-wise, with the private sector. In these two recent cases, otherwise quite far apart both spatially and thematically, law enforcement can be seen to flip this script by attempting to pin responsibility for social externalities on those it can reliably target: the victims and the small fry. Whether it is criminalizing those who pay to be rid of ransomware or rounding up the café owners who failed to participate in the State’s mass surveillance initiatives, the authorities signal the seriousness of their intentions with regards to combating social ills by targeting bystanders rather than the actual perpetrators. Politically, this is a myopic strategy, and I would not be surprised if it generated a significant amount of pushback.