Dr Pia Hüsch

For all the prominence of ransomware and the chaos left in its wake, most conversations around attacks tend to focus on the financial damage. Companies have blamed ransomware for insolvencies, while the global financial cost of ransomware attacks totals hundreds of billions of pounds. But there is another, less frequently discussed cost: the huge emotional and physical toll on the people left dealing with the aftermath of attacks. Two new reports, The Ransomware Victim Experience from defence thinktank RUSI and an accompanying academic article for the Journal of Cybersecurity, outline just how devastating these attacks are to victims’ health and wellbeing.

Google has 20,000 people working to counter disinformation worldwide. Teams attend ‘daily stand-ups’ on disinformation threats. Among various pre-established policies, YouTube has recently introduced a function where a video is flagged to the viewer if it has been manipulated. However, Dr Pia Hüsch, a research fellow in cyber at think tank RUSI, says she “does not think this has been a social media success story”. “We've seen a lot of voluntary pledges, particularly within that AI type context. But at the same time, we also know that a lot of staff have been made redundant. And a lot of ethics and other oversight boards have been reduced in size,” she says.

Similarly, Pia Huesch, a research analyst at the British defence and security think tank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) said Britain’s vocal support of Ukraine means the elections are “naturally at the receiving end of Russian information operations”.