It was a banner year for chaos, present and impending, and all reflected in the digital mirror.
Each year, WIRED assembles a list of the most dangerous people, groups, and organizations on the internet-both those who intentionally endanger innocent people and those whose actions, regardless of their intent, destabilize the world as we know it in myriad ways.
A year ago, it might have still been fair to regard Elon Musk as a brilliant technologist with occasional destructive, trollish tendencies.
Twitter, now renamed X thanks to Musk's branding whims, this year invited back conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and even amplified one account's antisemitic statements.
In July, Musk had said that his social media platform's ad revenue had fallen by half-all of which calls into question whether this once-central platform for online conversation will survive Musk's reign, and in what form.
In the midst of that meltdown, Musk's new startup xAI released Grok, an AI chatbot Musk celebrated for having fewer guardrails than OpenAI's ChatGPT. Musk faces calls for an SEC investigation for his comments about how monkeys died in experiments carried out by his brain implant startup Neuralink.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that Tesla's safety measures for assuring that drivers paying attention-which many no doubt were not, perhaps thanks in part to Musk's own descriptions of the assisted-driving feature-were inadequate.
Five years ago, WIRED put Musk's face on the cover with a story that described his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality.
According to cryptocurrency firm Chainalysis, it appears to be on track to be the second-worst year on record in terms of total extortion payments collected by the ransomware industry's coercive gangs of hackers.
Perhaps no group did more damage this year than the people behind the Cl0p malware.
A single victim, medical firm Maximus, lost control of the data of at least 8 million people in the breach.
In total, at least 62 million people were affected, and Cl0p's hackers remain at large.
If Cl0p were the most ruthless ransomware hackers of the year, Alphv, also known as Black Cat, were certainly in close contention.
The group, which has ties to the hackers who carried out the 2021 cyberattack on the Colonial Pipeline, gained a new level of notoriety in September when it targeted MGM Resorts International, shutting down computer systems across the hotel and casino chain and ultimately doing $100 million in damage, by MGM's estimate.
Despite sanctions, indictments, and even a $10 million bounty, Russia's team of hyper-aggressive military intelligence hackers known as Sandworm are still out there-and still active.
As Russia's invasion of Ukraine grinds toward its third brutal year they appear to have turned their focus to that conflict.
This year, Sandworm was revealed to have carried out a third blackout cyberattack against a Ukrainian electric utility, this time in the midst of a Russian air strike hitting the same city.
Evidence points to Sandworm's responsibility for a cyberattack just this month that hit the telecom Kyivstar, taking out internet and mobile communications for millions amid another series of strikes.
The group, in other words, continues to earn its reputation as the Kremlin's most dangerous hackers.
Last year, for the first time since 2015, Donald Trump was not included on this list.
This Cyber News was published on www.wired.com. Publication date: Thu, 28 Dec 2023 12:43:04 +0000