[Derrick Adams]

In 2020, the sudden move to working from home widened attack surfaces and gave criminals easy targets. Weak home Wi-Fi, reused passwords, and unpatched personal devices opened the door to ransomware and phishing. To keep operations running, many companies strengthened logins with multi-factor authentication, tightened least-privilege access, and pushed VPN and mobile/endpoint management out to laptops and phones. Teams also reviewed cloud configurations, turned on continuous monitoring, and began using zero-trust ideas that verify each connection, not just the first one. To limit damage if a breach occurred, organizations improved backup and restore routines and ran tabletop exercises to sharpen response. Taken together, these steps helped stabilize remote work while cutting the most active risks of the year.