Welcome back, fellow cyber junkies.

Well, that was short lived. In October, the term cybersecurity made it back into our top 10, coming in at #8. As a composite topic, the term was up 6% from Sept ’21 to Oct ’21; volume of stories was also up 57% from Oct ’20, and 55% from Oct ’19. Coverage volume also increased 9% from Sept ’21 (from ~110K stories to ~120K). Lastly, ransomware specifically experienced record gains – up 27% from Sept ’21 to Oct ’21 and moved up from #33 to #28 in our rankings.

As many of you know, October was cybersecurity awareness month which stood as the primary hook for most of the coverage. Most stories centered on fun cybersecurity facts or recommendations, as well as new cyber initiatives launched from various private sector companies. For example, Microsoft announced their plan to work with community colleges across the country to address the cyber workforce shortage. In the public sector, President Biden signed a bill strengthening K-12 school cybersecurity and the White House had a summit on combatting ransomware which made headlines.

As we head into the holidays, we will likely continue seeing the term cybersecurity stay on our top 10 list, and I expected that the term ransomware will also continue to climb the charts.

Looking forward, if you haven’t already, now is the time to start talking with your client about what they see coming in 2022 and some of the lessons learned from the past year. While 2021 certainly saw its fair share of breaches, it’s almost a certainty that 2022 will be more of the same.