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Cybersecurity used to mean just running McAfee antivirus software on your desktop computer.

That’s not true anymore.

Cyberattacks are no longer the result of clicking on a rogue link in a suspicious email. Now they occur on a global scale, and they are the subject of coverage from all major news outlets.

In the past two weeks, we’ve all learned about a major hack of the U.S. government. As CNBC reported:

The scale of a sophisticated cyberattack on the U.S. government that was unearthed this week is much bigger than first anticipated. 

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in a summary Thursday that the threat “poses a grave risk to the federal government.”

It added that “state, local, tribal, and territorial governments as well as critical infrastructure entities and other private sector organizations” are also at risk.

While CISA hasn’t identified the group responsible for this incredibly dangerous hack, many experts point to Russia. By hacking the IT management company SolarWinds, the cyber criminals were able to target the departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Treasury, and Energy; cybersecurity firms like FireEye Inc. (NASDAQ:FEYE); and the tech giant Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT).

Obviously, these attacks are a threat to investors’ capital. A cyberattack on any company can, at a minimum, spook the market and push a stock’s value lower.

Microsoft, for example, dropped slightly the day after its breach was reported, but the effects of any cyberattack could always be worse than simply losing money on one of the largest tech companies in the world.

That’s why cybersecurity has become a major investment opportunity.

The term cybersecurity describes a broad range of proactive protections and reactive defenses — all of which try to thwart a specific cyber threat or combination of threats.

The first-generation cybersecurity tactics were usually add-on’s to an existing hardware or software platform — kind of like building a wall around an existing house. But many next-generation tactics incorporate…