U.S. Department of Justice Launches Ransomware Task Force

In one of the latest of the federal government’s efforts to address today’s daunting cybersecurity challenges, the U.S. Department of Justice has formed a task force aimed at curtailing the proliferation of ransomware. The task force’s goal is to make these extortion schemes less lucrative by targeting the entire digital ecosystem that supports them. It will increase training and dedicate more resources to the issue, seek to improve intelligence sharing across the department, disrupt command and control infrastructure, and seize profits. It will also work to identify the many dimensions and root causes of this threat, including links between criminal actors and nation-states. “By any measure, 2020 was the worst year ever when it comes to ransomware and related extortion events,” said Acting Deputy Attorney General John Carlin Carlin, who previously ran the Justice Department’s national-security division during the Obama administration. “And if we don’t break the back of this cycle, a problem that’s already bad is going to get worse.” Read more at the Wall Street Journal and Infosecurity.