PORTSMOUTH — The Durham Police Department. The Sunapee School District. The Town of Salem.
What these three entities have in common, besides being public agencies within the Granite State, is that each was attacked by ransomware, an online crime where data is essentially kidnapped and held hostage until a ransom is paid. Don’t pay the ransom and the data is destroyed or otherwise compromised.
According to watchdog agencies, there were a total of 304 million ransomware attacks worldwide in 2020. This was a 62 percent increase from a year prior, and the second highest figure since 2014 with the highest on record being 638 million attacks in 2016.
Attacks like these gained notoriety this year because they affected the food chain (in the attack on JBS, the world’s largest meat packer) and the utility infrastructure (in the attack on the Colonial Pipeline).
A Portsmouth company – The ATOM Group (https://www.theatomgroup.com/) is doing what it can to help fight off these attacks by creating a new office dedicated to helping local and federal law enforcement agencies, state government, community mental health and outreach organizations, as well as not-for-profits serving New…
