US officials and security experts said the past year has been one of the worst on record for cybersecurity, marked not just by such repeated discoveries of bugs considered historic in their scope and potential severity but an onslaught of ransomware attacks on businesses and critical infrastructure as well. — 123rf.com
Last December, cybersecurity professionals began to unravel an extraordinary cyberattack on a little-known company based in Texas called SolarWinds. By hijacking the firm’s software-update mechanism, the hackers had gained the means for covert entry into their choice of thousands of unsuspecting customers.
That attack, which the US government blamed on Russia, infiltrated scores of federal agencies and private companies and was widely described as one of the worst intelligence failures in history. Things, it seemed, couldn’t get much worse.
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