Breach

An exposed AWS bucket left hundreds of thousands of student-related records exposed to the internet, but officials from the non-profit say most of the data was old and obsolete.

What might go down as the most consequential story of the year for the cybersecurity community only surfaced in December. And yet, experts predict years of clean up, both physical and political, and potential shifts in how the nation secures the supply chain.

Ticketmaster tried to steal both a client and design ideas from a competitor by logging into the back-end system with a former employer's login credentials.

Of particular concern among some cybersecurity experts is the fact that the company took several months to report to the incidents, which stemmed from unauthorized access to servers from overseas offices.

Communicating with the public, working with stakeholders and convincing insurers that root security failures have been addressed are all part of how companies come back from a bad breaches. But it still may not be enough.

The SolarWinds supply chain attack will likely prompt scores of compromised companies to send critical data breach notifications to their customers. But steps may be required to ensure these and other critical messages don't get ignored, bounced or quarantined.

The department formally confirmed the hackers' tentacles had reached into the agency, but that the malware injected had been isolated to its business networks. Some security experts argue, however, that visibility into the IT network may give hackers a path to the OT network.

Noteworthy is the combination of the targets, which adds up to what one researcher described as attacks against the backbone of the nation's critical infrastructure.