The past 12 months in cybersecurity have been a rough ride. In cybersecurity, everything is broken — it’s just a matter of finding it — and this year felt like everything broke at once, especially toward the end of the year. But for better or worse, we end the year knowing more than we did before.
Here we look back at the year that’s been, and what we learned along the way.
1. Ransomware costs businesses because of downtime, not ransom payments
The scourge of file-encrypting malware continues. Ransomware this year alone forced entire towns offline, blocked paychecks and caused fuel shortages, as entire company networks were held for ransom in exchange for millions of dollars in cryptocurrency payments. The U.S. Treasury estimates that ran …
