Nowadays, pretty much everything that we know is online. It has made life as we know it so much more convenient. We pay bills, shop, talk to our friends, and so much more online. Essentially, our entire lives have become stored somewhere in our phones and computers. While that is glorious, it is also quite dangerous. It only takes one experienced hacker to get into your systems and collect all of your important information. Ransomware is where hackers hack into systems and hold information, hostage. Hospitals and healthcare are largely impacted by ransomware, which is a very scary thing. Considering everything that hospitals do is based on a system when someone hacks into that, it puts so many lives on the line. Healthcare workers cannot access important patient information, life-saving machines may not work, ambulances may be diverted from ERs, and those in the ER may not be able to get the care that they need. Therefore, having excellent cybersecurity is of the utmost importance nowadays. An important way to protect yourself is to ensure that you have strong passwords. Do not create passwords that someone could easily guess. Also, be careful about the attachments that you open, enable ad blockers, install a good antivirus program, and ensure that you have backup files. In doing all of those things, you help protect yourself against any attempts of someone trying to hack your most important information. I believe that educating people on the dangers of hackers and the importance of cybersecurity is more important today now than ever before.
Image link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2022/11/11/the-top-five-cybersecurity-trends-in-2023/
Hi Kayla, I think your analysis on what ransomware is a great to give others an understanding of how it can affect our daily lives and how important it is to protect ourselves from those using it. There have been many examples of companies and hospitals battling against because it will essentially ruin their operation for a short time, but the importance of cyber security is larger than ever before to prevent events like that happening.
Hey Kayla! You did a great job with this post. You really captured the effects of ransomware and I definitely learned from reading your post. It is crazy how much technology has really taken over our lives. A couple of months ago my phone broke and I couldn’t use it for a day, and it’s weird when actually put into a situation where you cannot use your own digital device. It kind of felt like I was going crazy! To also relate to the point you made about how everything in our lives is stored somewhere, I actually had an instance where I was on my phone and currently being hacked- where I was getting about ten emails a minute that was spam, and someone was trying to get into my google account. It’s scary when it happens to you. You think about your card information and where you put it, and how stupid and careless you were when doing so. It really puts it into perspective. I looked on google and it said there are about 800,000 people being hacked per year, and it’s crazy to think that even with that number, we continue to put all of our info onto the internet, without double-checking what we are doing.