Six months of 2019 are on the books already, and there have certainly been six months' worth of data breaches, supply chain manipulations, state-backed hacking cam­paigns, and harbingers of cyberwar to show for it. But the hallmark of 2019, perhaps, is feeling like the worst is yet to come. Ransomware is an ever-growing threat, corporate and US government security is still a mess, and geopolitical tensions are rising worldwide.

Before we see what the future holds, though, let's recap some of the major cybersecurity incidents that have cropped up so far this year.

In May, a surveillance contractor for US Customs and Border Protection suffered a breach, and hackers stole photos of travelers and license plates related to about 100,000 people. The Tennessee-based contractor, a longtime CBP affiliate known as Perceptics, also lost detailed information about its surveillance hardware and how CBP implements it at multiple US ports of entry. The Perceptics breach was first reported by The Register, and CBP officials later disclosed the incident to The Washington Post. Though CBP was hesitant at first to admit that Perceptics was the contractor that had suffered the breach, the agency sent a Microsoft Word document to the Post titled "CBP Perceptics Public Statement" in its initial response. Days later, hackers posted the stolen Perceptics data to the dark web. On Tuesday, CBP suspended Perceptics from federal contracting, though it did not say why.

CBP has spent the past two decades ramping up its use of border surveillance technologies, and there appears to be no end in sight. For example, the agency wants facial recognition scans to be standard in the top 20 US airports by 2021. But civil rights and privacy advocates say that these aggressive initiatives pose a danger to US citizens and the global community in general. The Perceptics incident is seen as a clear example of those risks. As Jeramie Scott, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, told WIRED in June, "The agency simply should not collect this sensitive personal information if it cannot safeguard it."

Ransomware attacks are truly nothing new at this point, but 2019 is looking like a banner year for them. Criminal groups continue to target businesses, health care providers, and, most visibly, local governments with these brash hacks, in which malware is used to encrypt a system's data and then demand a ransom to decrypt it—swindling victims of billions of dollars a year in the process. "We are seeing an increase in targeted ransomware attacks," the FBI told WIRED in a statement this week. "Cyber criminals are opportunistic. They will monetize any network to the fullest extent."

In 2019, though, ransomware isn't just targeting hospitals and small businesses. A destructive strain called LockerGoga has specifically been victimizing industrial and manufac­turing firms—at times forcing production plants to switch to manual control or exacting long-term damage in systems that control physical equipment. For now, incident responders say that LockerGoga is being used only by financially motivated criminals. It's easy to imagine, though, how this type of attack could be used by state-sponsored hackers on critical infrastructure, especially given how both North Korea's WannaCry and Russia's NotPetya were ransomware-like worms crafted with each country's geopolitical agenda in mind.

A legitimate software vendor pushes out what looks like a trustworthy software update to users, but it's really a destructive instrument of cyberwar. That is the evil genius of the supply chain attack. The most famous example is likely 2017's NotPetya attack, when Russian hackers spread destructive malware in part by compromising the update mechanism for a Ukrainian accounting application. And this type of malicious hacking has been a particular signature of 2019 so far.