Empirics prove this trueFowler, CNET, 2022

A year ago, gas prices on the East Coast surged after the operator of America's biggest fuel pipeline shut down amid a ransomware attack. The five-day-long cyber siege was a wakeup call: The country's infrastructure was vulnerable to criminals anywhere in the world. Colonial Pipeline paid millions dollars to restore its systems, which had been frozen by alleged associates of the REvil ransomware gang. Some of the payment, made in bitcoin, was eventually recovered. But memories of panic buying at the pumps linger to this day. Vincent D'Agostino, a former FBI agent who now leads cyber forensics and incident response at cybersecurity company BlueVoyant, says he knew Colonial Pipeline was going to be a big deal when he heard everyday people talking about it in the barber shop, adding that it was the first time he'd ever heard anyone there so much as mention bitcoin. "That's a really bad thing when you're a criminal, when you have regular people talking about the hack, and you have people unable to get fuel," says D'Agostino, who investigated both traditional organized crime and cybercrime while at the FBI. In the year since the Colonial attack, corporate America, the Biden administration and federal agencies like the Transportation Security Administration have taken steps to secure the country's critical infrastructure, which in addition to energy companies includes schools, cities and hospitals. They had to because Colonial Pipeline wasn't an outlier. Transit authorities, a meat processor and a business software company were all taken down as REvil roamed free for months on the internet. The number of successful ransomware attacks surged to new highs last year. Sixty-six percent of the organizations surveyed by Sophos for its annual State of Ransomware report admitted that they were hit with a ransomware attack in 2021, up from 37% in the year before. And 65% of those attacks succeeded in encrypting their victims' data, up from 54% the year before.