Another year has come and gone. We thought we’d be out of the pandemic, but we’re just starting the battle against the omicron variant (please get vaccinated if you haven’t already). We’re starting to travel more but flights are often canceled. I hope you weren’t one of the unlucky passengers who was supposed to fly on the 7,000 flights that were canceled around Christmas. Inflation is up and spending is too. Houses are still absurdly expensive. Let’s take a look back at tech news in 2021.
We started out the year with the biggest hack in history. The Solarwinds hack, which piggybacked on software that was compromised and used by thousands of companies, including many Fortune 500 companies and dozens of government agencies. We haven’t heard much about it since the initial reporting. I hope that means the damage done was mitigated more easily than we initially thought. But Solarwinds wouldn’t be the last major hack that we talked about.
The Colonial Pipeline, which extends from Texas to the East Coast, going through 12 states and terminating in New Jersey, was hacked and taken offline for more than a week. This pipeline accounts for 45% of all fuel consumed on the East Coast. Thousands of people panicked and lines that lasted hours could be seen at gas stations in the southeast. Some people even went as far as to fill up plastic bags with gasoline, which is extremely dangerous and shouldn’t be done.
The hackers employed a ransomware scheme, which uses malware to infect as many machines as it can and then encrypts as much data as it can. The only options once infected with ransomware are to either pay the ransom to get your files back, restore your files from a backup, or just accept the loss of the files that were encrypted.
The perpetrators wanted $5 million in Bitcoin for the decryption keys. The company paid the ransom and the FBI was able to recover more than 80% of it but declined to comment on how it was able to retrieve the cryptocurrency.
We were reminded that Facebook is an awful company again last year. We found out that the data of more than 500 million people was stolen and that Facebook didn’t think it warranted warning its users. Please stop using Facebook. Use shared albums if you want to share with family and friends. Apple and Google both have free options for this.
On more positive notes, the right to repair really started to gain traction in 2021. Several states have introduced bills that would force companies to provide parts and schematics to third parties so that we can repair our stuff instead of throwing it away. Even Apple announced its own repair program that will allow us to get parts for our phones, tablets and computers.
Robo calls might soon be a thing of the past. I’ve stopped answering all phone calls that are not from someone in my contacts list because I get maybe two calls a year from people I don’t know that aren’t scams. Americans last year lost $30 billion to these types of scams. In the summer an FCC regulation went into effect requiring telecom companies to authenticate calls. While this only affects calls that originate in the U.S., it should help to reduce the number of spam calls we get every week. I’ve noticed a drop in calls, I hope you have too.
This past year has felt quieter, for lack of a better term, and I think we should all be happy for that. Let’s hope for better things in 2022.
