A new year and a new decade are right around the corner. And while anticipation is high for 2020, now’s the perfect time to take a look back at 2019.

At CMIT Solutions, our QuickTips column covered it all across a busy 12 months: data breaches and cybersecurity enhancements, new tech twists and online privacy revelations alike.

The height of summer can be the most distracting time of the year. Leaving an hour (or two) early on Friday quickly becomes a regular occurence. Someone is always out of the office on vacation. Fiscal year turnovers can shift our focus up to the 30,000-foot view, forcing us to overlook day-to-day operations.

No industry changes more on a day-to-day basis than cybersecurity. New hacks, breaches, and viruses pop up all the time, while the methods that cyber thieves use to deploy such attacks evolve just as quickly.

In January, a double-pronged attack highlighted these illegal and ever-shifting strategies.

Last week, we passed a milestone: less than one year left until the end of Windows 7. As of January 14, 2020, the legacy operating system will no longer receive extended support or software updates from Microsoft, meaning any machine still running it past that date will be susceptible to security vulnerabilities.

After the city of Atlanta suffered a major ransomware attack earlier this year, other municipal governments have started confronting a serious question: how will they respond if a cyberattack occurs? Scott Tousley, a cybersecurity director for the Department of Homeland Security recently called the Atlanta incident “one of those red blinking lights that people talk about — it’s a warning bell.

Hurricane Florence, a powerful Category 4 hurricane, is threatening North and South Carolina with a direct hit this week. The rapidly intensifying storm also has the potential to stall near or just offshore, potentially impacting the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast with devastating winds, extreme storm surge, heavy rains, and extensive flooding.

In today’s digital world, passwords are a necessary inconvenience — too important to overlook as a critical part of comprehensive security. Protecting your passwords means you’re protecting your data, which in turn keeps your most important identifiers — Social Security numbers, credit card information, home addresses, email accounts, and phone numbers — safe.

As the cybersecurity landscape continues to shift and change, new incidents occur with the speed of breaking news. Fresh data breach reports happen every day. Password hacks at one company lead to identity theft at another. New strains of ransomware continue to spread like wildfire.

With summer in full swing and many fiscal years ending, it can be easy to overlook the most important part of your day-to-day work: technology. Chalk it up to the overwhelming wave of data breaches and software vulnerabilities, or the ongoing threat of ransomware, or the targeting of high-level email addresses and decision-making processes through social engineering.

Last week, security experts discovered that hundreds of thousands of networking devices made by a variety of manufacturers could be infected by malware. This “VPNFilter” cyberthreat has been identified in internet routers, firewalls, and network-attached storage devices, leading the FBI to request that anyone with a residential or consumer-based device reboot it by turning it of and then back on again.