How 2016 became the year of the hack – and what it means for the future

From Russia and the US election to revelations about Yahoo, the hallmark of the major cyber-attacks this year has been just how public they have become

While new revelations about Russian hacking during the US election continue to make headlines, they were by no means the only big cyber-attacks of the last year. In fact, there were so many that you could dub 2016 as "the year of the hack".

A hallmark of 2016 cyber-attacks has been just how public they have become. On 21 October, an attack on internet infrastructure provider Dyn with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack took down access to Netflix, Facebook, Twitter plus the Guardian, CNN, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and others.