Ejercicio B.3 · Inglés PAU Madrid Extraordinaria (2ª lengua) 2023

TEXTO B

Hacker’s Attack

Around 9 pm on Monday 23 November 2020, the IT manager for a school in central London received a text message from a colleague, saying the school’s website was down. He tried logging on but couldn’t. He first thought he had forgotten the password. After several attempts, he realised that he was locked out.

The IT manager, Matthew (he asked us not to use his last name), works in a central London neighbourhood inhabited by poor families whose children attend a small, publicly funded school. It has about 150 students aged between five and 10, many of them on free school meals. On a reduced budget, in a Victorian building that’s showing its age, teachers track the students’ progress by photographing them as they learn how to hold a pencil, draw a picture or write their name. The snapshots and other progress reports are uploaded to a server, a powerful computer that processes data and provides services for other devices used around the school.

Matthew, an affable Englishman in his early 40s, has guarded this valuable data on every child’s learning since 2016. Although the school can only afford to pay him a few thousand pounds a year as a contractor, he is devoted to its people and mission. When he found he couldn’t access the website, he was desperate.

To his horror, he realised that the school had been hit by a ransomware attack – one of the world’s most pervasive and fastest-growing cybercrimes. Ransomware penetrates computers and makes files inaccessible without the right decryption key. The hackers then demand a high price for the password that can unlock the information.

Adapted from “Ransomware hunters: the self-taught tech geniuses fighting cybercrime,” The Guardian, October 4, 2022. <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/04/ransomware-hunters-the-self-taught-tech-geniuses-fighting-cybercrime>

B.3.- Find the words in the text that mean:

(Puntuación máxima: 1 punto)

a)

b)

c)

d)