Welcome back to the podcast, bribes, swindle, or steel. I'm Alexandra Rogi. Today we're talking about

ransomware, the plague that's crippling small businesses, local government, police forces, and

others, really across the country. My guest is Renee Dudley. Renee is a tech

reporter with ProPublica. Prior to joining ProPublica last year, she was a member of the Enterprise

team at Reuters, where she uncovered systemic cheating on standardized entry tests for U.S. colleges.

The series was named a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist in national reporting.

Renee, thank you for joining me.

Thank you.

You've written a couple of really interesting pieces on this issue.

Before we talk about those specifically and what you uncovered, can you give us a primer on

ransomware what it is and how an attack unfolds?

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that gets onto your computer systems and encrypts all

your files. So what that means practically is you'll try to log onto your computer and you'll see

that you can't open any of the files. They've all been renamed with a new extension.

And oftentimes a ransom note will pop up on your screen.

And it will say, you know, it will either direct you to an email address or to a website on

tour, a dark web browser,

with instructions about how you can pay the hacker to retrieve your files.

And there are some free tools for decrypting ransomware without paying a hacker.

But generally speaking, if one of those doesn't exist, because

there's all different types of strains of ransomware, so if you've been hit with a strain for

which there's not a free public decryptor, your only recourse is to pay the hacker. And ransomware has

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