2020 was a wild year in most aspects. The cyber world was no exception.

The past year the use of technology escalated quickly when the world was forced to transition to an extremely virtual world, and cyber criminals took advantage of that as an opportunity to attack. Many businesses, small and large, were targeted and impacted by cybercrimes this year.

In a recent article, Wired shared seven of the worst hacks in 2020. What were they?

1. SolarWinds Supply Chain Hack: FirmEye, a large cybersecurity and incident response firm, ws breached. This breach led to a series of breaches of U.S. Government agencies. It was reported that all the breaches of the U.S. Government agencies was as a result of the intital compromise of the IT infrastructure firm, SolarWinds.

2. Twitter: Arguably one of the most known hacks was with the social media platform Twitter. Taking over the accounts of well known politians, celebrities and businesses, hackers tweeted with links to donate money, as a bitcoin scam. 130 accounts were target and almost $120,000.00 was aquired.

3. Blueleaks: A 269-gigabyte trove containing United States law enforcement information. The information was leaked by an activist group who reported the information was collected from the ephemeral hacking collective Anonymous. The break that took place on Juneteenth was the largest published hack of American law enforcement.

4. University Hospital Düsseldorf: This ransomware attack was intended for Heinrich Heine University but ended up taking over multiple servers at University Hospitak Düsseldorf. The hack left hospital systems and patients in danger. In fact, because of the crime, one patient was rerouted to a different hospital, delaying her medical attention and may have attributed to the patients death.

5. Vastaamo: Cybercriminals are known for targeting the medical world. This hack was another that did so. One of Finland’s largest psychiatric service networks, Vastaamo, was breached. The hackers demanded money or they would release stolen data of tens of thousands patients and their mental health treatment.

6. Garmin: The company’s cloud platform and website suffered a ransomware attack. That took down its email systems and customer call centers. The attack lead to many days of outage.

What does this mean to you and how do the attacks of 2020 impact you?

Now more than ever, your security is critical. While 2020 is behind us, we are still facing the COVID-19 pandemic. There are many businesses who continue to work remotely as a response to the ongoing medical circumstances. There are also many organization’s whose future may include a higher rate of work from home employees. This means that cybercriminals with continue to seek to take advantage and find ways to attack. It is imperative to take your security seriously and take appropriate measures to protect your business.