Worst security disasters of 2010

31.12.2010
This was the year 'security' morphed into the more serious-sounding 'cybersecurity'. Or, to put it less portentously, the US military and Government had a real shocker.

The year started badly with January's , widely blamed on the Chinese. The fallout was as considerable, with some EU governments . Hillary Clinton about cybersecurity-as-geopolitics.

Uncomfortably, the US was also at the centre of April's disturbing 'Collateral Murder' video, who turned out to be unarmed civilians and journalists.

Shocking vrit video has been on YouTube many times, but this video was different, having been prized from the encrypted vaults of the US military by an insider, who sent it to Wikileaks. The whistleblower followed this up with the and finally and the US diplomatic cables.

Our prediction: the US government will not enjoy 2011 any more than Julian Assange. in case retaliation got out of hand.

Piling humiliation on disaster, we learned that the . Meanwhile, after installing Trojans on the restaurant's computer systems.

No wonder Bruce Schneier wants .

At least that was less severe that the embarrassment piled on porn-loving customers of Sky, a UK TV network, after a database hack.

Most bizarre scam of the year? Probably the wealthy musician in New York . Not far behind that was the . People are afraid of calendar symmetries it seems, or perhaps just mathematically phobic.

The biggest security 'injustice averted of the year' was in order to get him sacked (he was caught), with the biggest 'don't mess with gamers' story hosting Call of Duty games. Headshot..!

Malware is normally the big security story of the year and there was one biggie, the Zeus attacks on US, UK and European online banking customers. There were a spate of stories throughput the year, .