By Alexander Kennedy,
SMCC Cyber Security graduate

As the year comes to a close, it’s a time for many to look back and reminisce about good times gone by. Some people may consider large news headlines of 2017 — we have a new president, hurricane season was worse than usual, and the United Kingdom started its transition out of the EU, to name a few. But for the first year in a long time, it’s safe to say many people probably recall one or two headlines relating to security breaches across the world.

So far, 2017 has seen at least one major security headline per month. In January, the U.S. Department of Energy reported that the U.S. electrical grid was in “imminent danger” of a cyberattack similar to ones seen in Ukraine a month prior.

February saw the breach of the internet company Cloudflare. The bug, known as CloudBleed, revealed sensitive information of users from companies such as OKCupid, Uber, and Fitbit.

In March, WikiLeaks unveiled Vault 7, a major compilation of data revealing CIA hacking tools that gave the agency the ability to listen to us via our smart TVs, as well as many other methods of turning our own computers against us.

Cybersecurity made it to the world stage in April when a phishing email scam was found to have successfully hacked the campaign of French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron.

May and June were dominated by ransomware attacks like WannaCry and NotPetya, which cost the global economy an estimated 4.2 billion dollars was well as compromising nearly half a million computers.
In July, security researchers proved voting machines were easily hackable. HBO was hacked in August, leading to the leak of “Game of Thrones” and “Silicon Valley” episodes.
September had the most notable hack of the year. Equifax reported that the Social Security numbers, names, addresses and other personal information of 145.5 million Americans had been compromised by hackers. For those who are counting, that is half of the U.S. population.

The past few months have seen breaches in Yahoo and Uber. Uber took it a step further and actually paid the attackers $100,000 in hush money.

Whether you’re in the technology field or not, 2017 has made it impossible to escape the news of cybersecurity. And most people couldn’t care less. It’s all too easy to become disillusioned with cybersecurity, with the sheer amount of articles saturating your news feed. But it is vital for us to care if we wish to keep building upon the connected world we live in.

For years, professionals in the cybersecurity industry have been trying to get people to understand the importance of security. The major cyber-events of 2017 have certainly kick-started the conversation on best practices for cybersafety and what you can do, as a consumer, to protect yourself from big-company data breaches. Hopefully, this trend will continue.

Hopefully, this year’s major security events do not scare us away from the awesome power and potential of the internet, but rather propel us into a new age of security-conscious communication and help us to discover what we can do, as consumers, to protect ourselves from big data breaches. Securing the internet is critical in keeping us safe as we interact together and grow our society in cyberspace.