Ransomware is being continually mentioned in the daily news and appears to be a seemingly unstoppable fiendish craze.

Perhaps the recent attack of ransomware on the Colonial Pipeline received the most rapt attention since it led to concerns over gasoline shortages and caused quite a stir amongst the general public. When ransomware is used against a particular bank or hospital or school, this normally doesn’t have quite the same widespread disruption as did the fuel pipeline incident.

The thing is, we are probably going to see a lot more ransomware being fielded and doing so against all manner of businesses and governmental entities. Some would assert that we are only so far at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to ransomware hacks.

Part of the reason why you can expect more use of ransomware is that it is relatively easy for an evildoer or crook to deploy the computer hacking scourge. Whereas the perpetrator used to need to have some keen computer nerdish skills, that’s pretty much not the case anymore. Sadly, the ease of attempting to infect computer systems with ransomware has become nearly easy-peasy and has opened the floodgates to just about any determined villain to try (ransomware programs can be cheaply purchased online via the so-called dark web). There are now plentiful Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) capabilities available that will do most of the heavy lifting for those that prefer a hands-off chauffeured form of ransomware cyberattacks.

As a point of clarification, not every use of ransomware is successful.

There are innumerable attempts that get rebuffed by cybersecurity protections or that are otherwise caught by alert computer security specialists. The rub is that the ransomware ploy only has to succeed one time, in the sense that if a malicious hacker tries a hundred different attempts at various entities, and only one of those takes hold, the crook still wins and the gambit was successful.

This is reminiscent of a popular catchphrase in the cybersecurity field, namely that the system protective measures need to be right all of the time, while the intrusion approaches only…