The Pegasus spyware, Facebook’s whistleblower crisis, zero-day exploits that threaten user safety, outages for popular websites, a supply chain shortage that refuses to go were some of the crises that defined most of 2021 for the tech world. There’s no doubt that as our lives become more enmeshed with the internet and everything digital, it was also evident that not all was perfect. We take a look at the top crises that defined this year gone by
The SolarWinds crisis might have started in December but its full impact became clearer only in 2021. The SolarWinds cyberattack is one of the world’s largest supply-chain-based cyberattacks, where Russian state-sponsored attackers are believed to have directly hacked and spied on the US government. The hackers made use of a vulnerability in a product made by Texas-based SolarWinds Corp, whose software was popular with many enterprises and a backdoor flaw gave these hackers full access to the computer systems.
But as Microsoft revealed in January 2021, its internal source code was likely viewed by the attackers, a much more serious problem. The company revealed at the time that the account that viewed the source code did not have “permissions to access the code, to modify it, nor was it authorised to access the engineering systems.”
This was worrying because source code for a software product if compromised could mean new unknown risks and hackers might potentially exploit any new flaws or...
Katy Perry is under investigation by Australian police following Ruby Rose’s explosive sexual assault claims against the singer. “Melbourne Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation Team (SOCI...