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Hi, I’m Jamie Condliffe. Greetings from London. Here’s a look at the week’s tech news:

Imagine you’re a mayor trying to spend your city’s money wisely. You’ve heard about ransomware attacks, where hackers locking I.T. systems using encryption and demanding money for their release. But what should you do about them?

Ideally, you’d ensure systems are up-to-date and properly backed up. But it’s “unrealistic” to expect many cities to afford big security overhauls, according to Gregory Falco, a cybersecurity entrepreneur who teaches at Columbia, Harvard and M.I.T. as well as researching at Stanford.

And it might never happen, right?

Only:

“More than half a dozen cities and public services across the country have fallen to ransomware so far in 2019, on a near-monthly basis; the Administrative Office of the Georgia Courts became the latest victim on Saturday.”

Cities are now seen as low-hanging fruit by hackers, because of “legacy systems and lack of budget” to upgrade, said Jennifer Daffron, a risk researcher at the University of Cambridge. They’re also great places to cause chaos, and hackers, especially nation-state ones, “love to cause chaos to get street cred,” Mr. Falco said.