Cybersecurity’s bad and it’s getting worse

As for me: I’ll be heading to Johannesburg, where my wife will be doing her first tour as a U.S. Foreign Service officer. I’ll be doing some freelance reporting, so send any South Africa stories and tips my way. Please stay in touch. You’ll still be able to find me on Twitter. Other contact info is in my bio there. 

It’s hard to overstate how much cybersecurity has surged as a top concern

There are few analogues in history for how cybersecurity has surged in importance as a government policy issue during the past eight years. 

It’s gone from a relatively back-burner issue embraced by a handful of government officials and lawmakers to a top national security concern — one that prompts partisan squabbles in Congress and heated confrontations between U.S. and Russian presidents. 

And that’s probably just the beginning. Things will definitely get wilder from here. 

This is my last Cybersecurity 202 after three-and-a-half years authoring this newsletter and eight years as a journalist on the cyber beat. 

Eight years is a long time on any beat. It’s several lifetimes on this one. 

Here are three big themes that have preoccupied my reporting the past eight years.

Cybersecurity wasn’t unimportant when I started on this beat in April 2014. But it was a shadowy topic, more fretted about than understood. When cyber news stories broke through to mainstream audiences, they were usually about credit and debit card breaches that had limited real impact on consumers except the few who suffered identity theft. 

The big story at the time was a mammoth…