2021: stay vigilant for viruses!

The year 2020 will go down in the history books as “the year of the coronavirus,” and that is completely understandable and justified. Yet in our industry, we also noted the emergence of other viruses, namely those that take down computer systems. Ransomware was responsible for major damage to organizations such as universities, municipalities and hospitals. In Düsseldorf, there was even the first official death from ransomware, when computer systems at the hospital were down and a patient died during a necessary move to another hospital. Thus, it appears that a ransomware attack is not only dangerous computer systems, but also to large groups of people. It did become a human problem as well, and not without dangers. Imagine a hacker taking down an important infrastructure system, such as the flood defenses in Zeeland. The consequences are incalculable.

Vaccines

If all goes well, the coronavirus’ existence will be threatened in the coming year by large-scale vaccinations. Against computer viruses, however, no conclusive cure has yet been found. It is and always will be important to stay alert and minimize the risk of getting a virus in and protect our systems. Only recently, the Hof van Twente municipality lost its backups and the system was encrypted. Ransom: 50 bitcoins, worth some 750,000 euros.

Working from home

We started working from home more and more over the past year, and it turned out that this is not entirely without its dangers either. Passwords prove easy to crack, often because the user in question does not consider creating a password that is difficult for a hacker to guess. A German newspaper published a top 10 most used passwords last week. At 1: 123456. On 2, slightly more difficult: 123456789. At 3: password. At 9: ichliebedich. If we need to work on anything in the new year, it is this kind of easily preventable risk.

2021

What else can we expect from the new year? Governments need to start putting email archiving in order. Furthermore, we will look at the dangers at The Internet Of Things, the Amnesia33 virus, “common ground” and the issues that always concern us. We hope we can also keep and make this world a little safer and healthier.

Happy New Year!

Nothing remains but to wish you all a good and, above all, healthy Christmas in every way, and a good start to a hopefully worry-free 2021.