That means businesses from tiny Belleair Bluffs to larger areas like the city of St. Petersburg — are well aware of the threats hackers pose.
“Ransomware is a growing trend right now because (hackers) saw potential,” said Miloslava Plachkinova, interim director of the University of Tampa’s cybersecurity program. She said cyber criminals “saw organizations and governments were not doing enough to protect themselves.”
Allan Liska, an intelligence analyst with Recorded Future, said ransomware attackers tend to be opportunists, looking for weak systems. He said that tends to be smaller or mid-size towns that “don’t necessarily have the money to put the protections in place to keep the bad guys out.”
Tampa and across the bay, St. Petersburg faces perpetual threats of system-wide ransomware breaches.
