The Covid-19 pandemic hit global economies hard in 2020, including the criminal underground—and malware detections fell appreciably. A year later, as coronavirus restrictions were eased around the world, malware roared back into our lives at record levels. Malware’s “Covid bounce” was visible everywhere, in detections for almost all types of malicious or unwanted software, on Windows and on Macs. In the last year, events in cybersecurity punctured the public consciousness repeatedly, and terms like “SolarWinds,” “Colonial Pipeline,” “HSE,” “Kaseya,” and even “Log4j” took on larger-than-life new meanings.
But although the incidents those names now represent will linger in memory, 2021 is most likely to be remembered as the year that ransomware was discussed by presidents and hunted by the military. The ransomware epidemic isn’t over, and it may not even have peaked, but the threat it poses to businesses, supply chains and critical infrastructure is no longer in doubt, and the forces arrayed against it have never been so formidable.
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