I read in the ARA that the National Police A 19-year-old boy has been arrested in Igualada to steal "64 million pieces of personal data which he then resold online." There were "ID numbers, names and surnames, home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and IBAN codes."

Like covid-19, cybercrime seems to be here to stay. Perhaps we cannot speak of a pandemic, but we can speak of a new type of crime that is growing like wildfire and that we are already seeing that it can affect everyone. The case of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) has made this porosity evident: any business or institution, however small it may be -even a private individual-, can be the victim of an attack, especially of the ransomware type which are now the most common. They are the pirates of the 21st century: they do not attack ships, but computers, but they also demand ransoms to free them. By now it is a problem of global vulnerability. No one escapes it. Interpol, which defines the situation as "critical", is calling for a joint global strategy. It is estimated that 1,500 attacks take place every day in the world, and the rate is growing all the time. It seems that half of the victims end up paying, even though the police strongly recommend against it because the logical consequence is that by doing so cybercrime is reinforced and, in addition, no one can guarantee that after a while you will not suffer an attack again; you may have reinforced your security systems, but you have also sent a message of weakness to extortionists. The right course of action is to report it and to act quickly through experts within the hacked computer system to minimise the damage.

The ransomware attack that has ripped through the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) is a type of malicious software that restricts access to affected files until a ransom is paid, which in this case would be €3m in cryptocurrencies. What has happened at the UAB is really very serious, but it is not a novelty nor a surprise. It has been suffered by other large organisations before. Just remember that five months ago the US pipeline Colonial was the victim of one, which caused petrol to become more expensive on the east coast of the United States until the company paid the hackers $5m in bitcoins. More recently, in late June, the world's leading meat producer, JBS, also from the United States, suffered an attack that severely affected its production. Cyber insecurity, associated with cryptocurrencies – the difficulty in tracing them is what gives cybercriminals impunity – has become a global problem, both in terms of privacy and economics. If global action is not taken, the trickle of attacks will increase and may endanger global stability.