2015 plagued by cyber breaches of government, industry systems – but it’s only going to get worse

(Cyberwar.news) This past year will go down in history as the “year of the cyber breach,” so to speak, as a plethora of government and private sector IT systems, as well as those that manage critical U.S. infrastructure, were infiltrated by hackers foreign and domestic.

As noted by Molly Bernhart Walker, editor of FierceGovernmentIT, “Federal information technology systems have experienced breaches for years, as documented in a steady trickle of intrusions reports by watchdogs and in reports to Congress, but in many ways such cybersecurity incidents reached a crescendo in 2015.”

She referenced several high-profile public sector breaches that captured the public’s attention, including hacks at the Office of Personnel Management and Internal Revenue Service, as well as Sony Entertainment and in the health insurance sector.

“Perhaps most newsworthy was the revelation by federal officials this summer that two databases at OPM were breached, leading to the theft of the personally identifiable information of some 21.5 million current and former federal employees and their close contacts,” she wrote.

As Cyberwar.news has reported as well, there have been breaches of virtually all U.S. infrastructure – hydroelectric dams and power plants, water treatment facilities and virtually every system that is connected to the Internet. China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and even the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have all targeted U.S. and Western systems this past year, despite historic cyber agreements.

Look for more breaches in the months to come, analysts note. In fact, in what may surprise many, car hacking is thought by some to be the most important cyber threat next year, according to FindLaw.

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See also:

FierceGovernmentIT

Cyberwar.news

FindLaw