In 2019, million-record data breaches barely made headlines while ransomware attacks crippled city governments and artificial intelligence (AI) became a tool for both attackers and defenders. We looked back at hundreds of news stories from the past 12 months and found four trends that defined this year in cybersecurity. With an election coming up for the U.S. in 2020, there will no doubt be more fireworks to come next year.
1. Big Breaches Get Bigger
It wasn’t long ago when mega-breaches were big news. Today, such incidents are commonplace.
Risk Based Security reported this summer that 2019 was on track to be the worst year on record for breach activity, with 4.1 billion records compromised in the first six months alone. At least 10 data breaches in 2019 involved the theft or exposure of databases containing at least 100 million records, including several instances where data was left exposed on unsecured servers.
Many cybersecurity experts now say it’s virtually certain that every U.S. citizen has had at least some personal information exposed due to a cyberattack. The silver lining, if there is one, is that the value of individual records has fallen to literally a dime a dozen on the dark web, forcing criminals to look elsewhere for profits.
2. Sometimes, the Enemy Is Us
Cloud platforms can support world-class protection against attacks on their infrastructure — too bad the same can’t always be said for their customers. Misconfigured cloud storage instances, unpatched applications and lax acce ..
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