Bitdefender, a cyber security firm, says that in 2020 there was an increase of 485 per cent in registered attacks over 2019. After tracking one criminal group, REvil, Dutch telecoms company KPN established it demanded an average of $260,000 per attack. These days non-payers can expect their confidential data to be released online. Beyond the damage caused and the money lost, these attacks reflect an even more serious issue to which there has been no systematic response. Over the past ten years, we have started to outsource our cars, our homes, our finance, our utilities, our factories, our everything to a dense jungle of ever more complex networked computer systems. All this is built on an Internet infrastructure which was never developed with security in mind and now requires endless patches, fixes and bodges to prevent its collapse.