The Top 10 Cybersecurity Stories Of 2019

There can be no doubt, as 2019 draws ever closer to an end, that it has been quite the year as far as cybersecurity is concerned. I have reported on everything from the world’s top 100 worst passwords to how Apple’s iPhone FaceID was “hacked” in less than 120 seconds. The year didn’t even start on a high note, with the revelation of the “Collection 1” data dump affecting more than 770 million people. Within a month, this had been followed by collections two to five, taking the total number of hacked accounts involved to 2.2 billion. Hardly surprising, then, that the first six months of 2019 alone saw data breaches expose more than 4 billion records. The most difficult story I had to write, though, was how one in six CISOs were self-medicating or abusing alcohol as a result of the stresses the job entails. The cybersecurity mental health warning doesn’t only affect those at the top of the corporate tree; security researchers are also at risk. The one thing that all the stories above have in common is that none of them feature in the top 10 of my cybersecurity stories as measured by how many of you were reading them. So, without further ado, here are the top 10 cybersecurity stories of 2019, which open a window onto the 2020 cyber threatscape.