It was a tumultuous year in cybersecurity, which saw both the private sector and government increasingly pummeled by attacks that forced both the Biden administration and Congress to take steps to strengthen the nation\u2019s cybersecurity against both nation states and cybercriminals.<\/p>\n
Microsoft breach:\u00a0<\/strong>The impact of the SolarWinds hack, discovered late in 2020 to have allowed Russian government-backed hackers to compromise nine U.S. government agencies, was dying down when\u00a0Chinese hackers began exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft\u2019s Exchange Server. Microsoft acknowledged the\u00a0breach in March.<\/p>\n The vulnerabilities left thousands of organizations exposed and led to the United States and other allied nations formally\u00a0blaming<\/a>\u00a0China for exploiting the vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n This was the second time that the Biden administration stepped in during 2021 to formally pin the blame on another nation for a cyberattack, with President Biden levying\u00a0sanctions<\/a>\u00a0on Russia in April in retaliation for both the SolarWinds hack and election interference.<\/p>\n More hacks, more action:\u00a0<\/strong>Beyond nation state interference, ransomware attacks rose to the forefront of concerns in 2021. An\u00a0attack in May<\/a>\u00a0on Colonial Pipeline, which provides 45 percent of the East Coast\u2019s fuel, preceded temporary gas shortages. Later, ransomware attacks on meat producer\u00a0JBS USA<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0IT company Kaseya<\/a>\u00a0also served to endanger critical organizations and supply chains.<\/p>\n Biden\u00a0signed an executive order<\/a>\u00a0to strengthen the federal government\u2019s cybersecurity in the week after the discovery of the Colonial Pipeline hack, and Congress took up legislation to require companies to report cyber incidents. This bipartisan legislation is still\u00a0awaiting passage<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It was a tumultuous year in...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-science-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43497"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43498,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43497\/revisions\/43498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}