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Cybercrime
Hacked off
The Ransomware Hunting Team. By Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 368 pages; $30 and £23.99
ON JULY 16TH 2019 Teiranni Kidd, heavily pregnant, was admitted to hospital in Alabama. Unbeknown to her, the hospital had been hit with a ransomware attack-a malicious program had scrambled its computers, and the attackers were demanding money to restore them. With its systems down, medics were forced to rely on pen and paper to get their jobs done. In a subsequent lawsuit Ms Kidd alleges that, because of this, nobody noticed her daughter's birth was going badly. The baby was eventually born with severe brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen during the delivery, and died nine months later.
Over the past decade ransomware attacks have spread like knotweed. Alabama's hospitals are not the only ones to have been affected. When Britain's National Health Service was hit in 2017 more than a third...