Cyber attacks, like the pandemic that has spurred the rise in incidents, have been relentless. Over the past eight months, there has been a significant escalation as the sophistication of these attacks has risen. Hackers are going after key vendors, allowing them to target wide swaths of valuable victims like we have seen in the attacks on SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange, Colonial Pipeline, and more recently, MSP software provider Kaseya.

The pandemic hastened long-developing trends toward digitization and decentralization. As virus concerns, social distancing guidelines and convenience pushed people online, ecommerce sales surged, expected to hit $4.2 billion globally this year, jumping ahead by years in the process. To be sure, this isn’t a one-time trend. According to one survey , nearly half of shoppers who altered their shopping habits in 2020 plan to make those changes permanent.

Last year’s rapid and sometimes erratic transition to remote work left many businesses looking for new ways to understand employee behavior when working from home. According to a survey of 2,000 employers offering remote or hybrid work, 78 percent deployed employee monitoring software to track worker behavior in the past six months. As businesses emerge from the recent pandemic, it’s clear that some things will not return to business as usual.

As businesses emerge from a pandemic year, cybersecurity concerns are necessarily top of mind . Companies face expansive cybersecurity threats on many fronts, prompting 75 percent of business leaders to view cybersecurity as integral to their organization’s COVID-19 recovery. They undoubtedly face an uphill battle. Surging ransomware attacks and increasingly deceptive phishing scams are attracting national attention, while more than 500,000 cybersecurity jobs remain unfilled in the US alone.

The recent pandemic pushed medical facilities and staff to the brink, taxing resources, exhausting employees, and disrupting decades of norms and protocols. It also accelerated technological trends that were quickly becoming popular, namely the centrality of technology and data in patient care. Today, many medical practices are digital-first operations, embracing telehealth and remote work at far greater levels than before the pandemic.

From healthcare to education to critical infrastructure, nobody seems to be safe from cyber attacks. Not even video game creators. News broke in early June that video game giant Electronic Arts was one of the latest victims of a major breach. At first glance, this is just another story of hackers breaking into a victim and finding their way to a sizable pay day. Nothing new here. Plenty of attacks happen every week, right? However it was the way that the attackers got in that was interesting.

The costs and consequences of a data breach or cybersecurity incident have never been more severe. According to the FBI’s recently released Internet Crime Report 2020, cybercrime resulted in $4 billion in losses last year, a low estimate that still encapsulates the incredible value lost to threats actors. For small businesses, the costs can be catastrophic. As Vox reports, 60% of small businesses will close after a data breach, underscoring the high-stakes bottom-line nature of cybersecurity.

In February 2020, a Time Magazine headline declared, “The Coronavirus outbreak has become the world’s largest work-from-home experiment.” Over a year later, that experiment has been a resounding success for companies and employees who found abundant upsides to less rigid workplace expectations.