DPUs remain mired in misconceptions; SDxCentral’s most popular articles of 2021; and a recap of December’s biggest executive shakeups.

Before we start speculating on how bad the bugs are going to get next year, let’s take a look back at some of the worst cyberattacks of 2021.

Cisco added support for Alkira’s multi-cloud networking platform; attackers used Log4j to target 44% of corporate networks; and Sysdig raised $350 million.

Cloud security unicorn Wiz says more than 89% of all IT environments have vulnerable Log4j libraries.

“This vulnerability is so dangerous because of its massive scale,” Forrester Analyst Allie Mellen said.

Security and observability are coming together; Kyndryl partnered with Google Cloud; and AT&T and Verizon dismissed AWS Private 5G as a competitive threat.

Women make up just 25% of the cybersecurity workforce; employers and employees have divergent views on remote work; and Platform9 named Bhaskar Gorti CEO.

“Our customers require a strong security posture that can be realized at speed,” said Taree Reardon, manager of MDR at VMware.

Kyndryl named Microsoft as its first cloud partner; Juniper Networks CEO challenged Cisco's compatibility with Arista switches; and Palo Alto Networks leads Gartner's firewall magic quadrant.

Trend Micro says it secures 2.5 trillion cloud events daily; Gartner find 18% of organizations use chaos engineering; and Aviatrix dips its toes into the security market.

The high-severity vulnerability leaves Cisco's FTD and ASA firewall families open to denial-of-service attacks.

Vodafone will deploy VMware's Telco Cloud Platform in European markets; Kyndryl announced a partnership with Microsoft; and Extreme Networks reported a solid first fiscal quarter of 2022.

“​​I'm a firm believer in the more diversity you have in your teams, the more effective your teams are going to be,” Fortinet Deputy CISO Renee Tarun said.

It’s not so much the spying that poses the problem. Employees just want their companies to be transparent about their surveillance measures.

Qualys determined that the 36 most prevalent ransomware families used about 110 CVEs. And all of them have patches available for the past several years.

“There has been a significant uptick in ransomware over the last year and a half, two years,” Chris Inglis said. “It's been a long time in the making.”

The metaverse may be the next medium for cybercrime; VMware and Dell Technologies completed their spinoff deal; and Netskope released Cloud Exchange.

Verizon plans to offer Fortinet’s SD-WAN platform; AMD reported $4.3B in Q3 revenue; and the Linkerd 2.11 update extends zero-trust security to Kubernetes environments.

“The market very obviously moved in the direction of OT security. And Dragos has been pretty far out in front of our competitors,” CEO Robert M. Lee said.

“Security continues to be an increasing area of focus and a differentiator for us,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said.

Cohesity released services to fight sophisticated ransomware attacks; Promiso added AIOps-enhanced networking to its platform; and ESG reporting requires more regulation.

The two new SaaS products “help address the [data] exfiltration challenge around ransomware attacks,” Cohesity Head of Product Matt Waxman said.

Google activated its cybersecurity A-team and touted its cloud progress; and Red Hat upped its Kubernetes edge game.

“We've made a move to help companies look at their entire supply chain, vendors, contractors, everything at scale,” Black Kite CEO Paul Paget said.