Microsoft launched windows 10, we saw Google re-brand itself as Alphabet, Apple released the IWatch and IPad Pro, Tesla unveiled a battery system for homes and Samsung updated its line of smartphones.
However, it was also a year we saw some of the tech giants come under fire for some shady practices.
- Lenovo was found to be installing spyware on their laptops
- Dell shipped a rogue HTTPS certificate on customer hardware
- Apple was sued over the shrinking storage available on their devices
- Samsungs new smart TV's were listening to and, potentially, uploading sensitive conversations
- Volkswagon used technology in their cars to cheat emissions tests in both America and Europe
- Oracle was forced to issue warnings to users of its Java software about potential security risks
The EU government was also unhappy with US companies for sharing information with security agencies. The European Court of Justice ruled in October that the existing Safe Harbour Decision was invalid leading to talks towards a new framework for transatlantic data sharing.
There was also some very high profile cyber attacks.
The biggest of the bunch was the infidelity service Ashley Madison with millions of user details published online, the fallout from which is likely to be felt for sometime. TalkTalk suffered a significant and sustained attack which resulted in thousands of customer bank details being stolen and lead to claims that they had not acted quickly enough to protect their customers. There was also an increase in Point of sale attacks this year and, in particular, a number of hoteliers were caught out including Hilton, Hyatt and Sheraton who all suffered breaches.
Even the government was not safe with the US Office of Personnel Management hack exposing millions of employee records and the UK education network JANET suffered a DoS attack which prevented students accessing online services for several days.
It was also the year that hackers installed trojans into IOS apps on the official Apple store and Juniper discovered back-door code had been installed in the operating system for their line of firewall products.
There was more bad news for travelers in 2015.
IPads used by American Airlines flight crew had an app error in April which grounded their flights. In both June and July, United had to ground flights because of IT problems and in August, a fault with the Federal Aviation system caused hundreds of planes to take off late.
So what does this mean for 2016?
The internet of things is set to dominate the technology industry in the next year and security will become increasingly important for devices of all shapes and sizes. With the number of devices connected to the internet set to rise to almost 7billion next year, all of which will present a possible point of attack, we will need to change our approach to security.
We will no longer will be able to rely on huge fortresses(aka Data Centres or the Cloud as some people like to call them) to keep our information safe, we will need to build security into every device and ensure that there is a strong security culture in every organisation.