Hello and welcome to The Edition.

Each week we look at some of the most important and intriguing issues in the week's magazine

with the writers behind them.

I'm Laura Prendergast.

This week, how worried should we be about ransomware?

Plus, why are Italians protesting about their green passes?

And finally, is it harder to be a good Samaritan in the modern world?

First up, in the spectator's cover story this week,

Kieran Martin, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, looks at the

issue of ransomware attackers, who are the new pirates of the world.

In the piece, Kieran takes us through the recent history of this online extortion trend

and asks how best to combat it.

He joins me now along with Tommy DeVos, who used to work as a hacker and now works as an ethical hacker.

Kieran, you write our cover story this week on the ever-present and growing danger of ransomware.

For those you might just be hearing this term for the first time, what exactly is ransomware?

It's extortion by electronic means. So you get extorted in two ways, often at the same time.

One is the malicious code malware deployed on the network locks you out of the network, so you just can't use it.

So, for example, it's featured in the piece when the Harris Federation, which runs 50 of London's schools, got ransomwared, it had the

impacts that the schools couldn't pay bills, but also some of the schools' doors wouldn't even

open because they were electronic, they were internet controls. So that's one impact, and they say,

unless you pay us X million, X hundred thousands in cryptocurrency, whatever it is, you won't

get back into your network. The second thing that they will do is say, here's some sensitive

...