COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the WHO on March 11, 2020. It led to millions of deaths, healthcare collapse in some regions, and major economic disruptions worldwide.COVID-19 is the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus. It usually spreads between people in close contact.COVID-19 vaccines provide strong protection against severe illness and death. Although a person can still get COVID-19 after vaccination, they are more likely to have mild or no symptoms.Anyone can get sick with COVID-19 and become seriously ill or die, but most people will recover without treatment.People over age 60 and those with existing medical conditions have a higher risk of getting seriously ill. These conditions include high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, immunosuppression including HIV, cancer and pregnancy. Unvaccinated people also have a higher risk of severe symptoms.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck southern Turkey and northern Syria, causing over 50,000 deaths and widespread infrastructure damage. When the 7.8-magnitude earthquake struck southern Turkey (officially the Republic of Türkiye) and northwest Syria on February 6, 2023, it caused devastating destruction. World Vision swiftly responded to the heightened challenges faced by the survivors, including those made vulnerable by the ongoing conflict in Syria. The catastrophic event worsened conditions in a region already hosting thousands of Syrian refugees. Your immediate and generous support played a crucial role in alleviating the suffering caused by displacement, heightened levels of hunger, malnutrition, and limited access to healthcare and educational support. Your gifts enabled the timely delivery of vital assistance to over 1.8 million people affected in Turkey and Syria within the first year. Hope endured for so many vulnerable children throughout the year in their most difficult times. Children like Baker*, who was orphaned by the destruction, have reclaimed their smiles. For girls like Sahar*, new dreams are beginning to unfold as her nightmares fade away

A sophisticated cyberattack, attributed to a state actor, compromised U.S. government and private systems via SolarWinds software. On December 13, 2020, FireEye announced the discovery of a highly sophisticated cyber intrusion that leveraged a commercial software application made by SolarWinds. It was determined that the advanced persistent threat (APT) actors infiltrated the supply chain of SolarWinds, inserting a backdoor into the product. As customers downloaded the Trojan Horse installation packages from SolarWinds, attackers were able to access the systems running the SolarWinds product(s). This cyber-attack is exceptionally complex and continues to evolve. The attackers randomized parts of their actions making traditional identification steps such as scanning for known indicators of compromise (IOC) of limited value. Affected organizations should prepare for a complex and difficult remediation from this attack.

An escalation in armed conflict between Hamas and Israel led to thousands of casualties and ongoing regional instability. More than 70 people have been killed after Israeli forces fired at Palestinians collecting food aid in the Gaza Strip, taking the total death toll to more than 30,000 since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza nearly five months ago, according to the Ministry of Health in the besieged enclave. The ministry’s update on Thursday comes amid a deepening humanitarian crisis in Gaza, on the brink of famine, as the Israeli military threatens a ground invasion of Rafah, where about 1.5 million people, most of them were displaced by the war, are sheltering. On Thursday, it was reported that soldiers opened fire on civilians waiting for flour for their families in Gaza City, killing at least 70 Palestinians in an attack described as a cold-blooded “massacre” by the Palestinian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates. The ministry said of the 30,035 people killed so far in the conflict, more than 13,000 were children and 8,800 women. At least 70,457 people have been injured, of which more than 11,000 are in critical condition and need to be evacuated.

A massive earthquake and tsunami triggered a nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, releasing radioactive materials. It began on 11 March 2011, when the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan struck off the country's eastern coast. The 9.0-magnitude quake was so forceful it shifted the Earth off its axis. It triggered a tsunami which swept over Japan's main island of Honshu, killing more than 18,000 people and wiping entire towns off the map. At the Fukushima nuclear power plant, the gigantic wave surged over coastal defences and flooded the reactors, sparking a major disaster. Authorities set up an exclusion zone which grew larger and larger as radiation leaked from the plant, forcing more than 150,000 people to evacuate from the area. The Fukushima Disaster is classified as a level seven event by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the highest such event and only the second event to meet this classification after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. The Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is in the town of Okuma, in Fukushima Prefecture. It sits on the country's east coast, about 220km (137 miles) north-east of the capital Tokyo.

The U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing over 140,000 people and marking a pivotal moment in World War II. Throughout July 1945 the Japanese mainlands, from the latitude of Tokyo on Honshu northward to the coast of Hokkaido, were bombed just as if an invasion was about to be launched. In fact, something far more sinister was in hand, as the Americans were telling Stalin at Potsdam. In 1939 physicists in the United States had learned of experiments in Germany demonstrating the possibility of nuclear fission and had understood that the potential energy might be released in an explosive weapon of unprecedented power. On August 2, 1939, Albert Einstein had warned Roosevelt of the danger of Nazi Germany’s forestalling other states in the development of an atomic bomb. Eventually, the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development was created in June 1941 and given joint responsibility with the war department in the Manhattan Project to develop an atomic bomb. After four years of intensive and ever-mounting research and development efforts, an atomic device was set off on July 16, 1945, in a desert area near Alamogordo, New Mexico, generating an explosive power equivalent to that of more than 15,000 tons of TNT. Thus the atomic bomb was born. Truman, the new U.S. president, calculated that this monstrous weapon might be used to defeat Japan in a way less costly of U.S. lives than a conventional invasion of the Japanese homeland. Japan’s unsatisfactory response to the Allies’ Potsdam Declaration decided the matter. (See Sidebar: The decision to use the atomic bomb.) On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb carried from Tinian Island in the Marianas in a specially equipped B-29 was dropped on Hiroshima, at the southern end of Honshu: the combined heat and blast pulverized everything in the explosion’s immediate vicinity, generated fires that burned almost 4.4 square miles completely out, and immediately killed some 70,000 people (the death toll passed 100,000 by the end of the year). A second bomb, dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, killed between 35,000 and 40,000 people, injured a like number, and devastated 1.8 square miles.

A massive undersea earthquake caused a tsunami that devastated Japan’s eastern coast and killed over 18,000 people. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude (Mw) 9.1 earthquake struck off the northeast coast of Honshu on the Japan Trench. A tsunami that was generated by the earthquake arrived at the coast within 30 minutes, overtopping seawalls and disabling three nuclear reactors within days. The 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami event, often referred to as the Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami, resulted in over 18,000 dead, including several thousand victims who were never recovered. In Japan, the event resulted in the total destruction of more than 123,000 houses and damage to almost a million more. Ninety-eight percent of the damage was attributed to the tsunami. The costs resulting from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan alone were estimated at $220 billion USD. The damage makes the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami the most expensive natural disaster in history. To learn from the tragedy in Japan, researchers collected extensive data on tsunami wave forces and building performance. This facilitated improvement in tsunami mitigation strategies, such as building codes. Over 6,400 tsunami wave measurements were collected in Japan and the Pacific region.

Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, leading to a major European war with global implications for security, economy, and refugees. The Russia-Ukraine war, which began with Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the ensuing conflict in the Donbas, escalated dramatically with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. This intensification marked the largest and deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, fundamentally altering the geopolitical landscape and causing immense human suffering. The 2022 invasion saw Russian forces launch multi-pronged attacks, targeting Kyiv from the north, as well as advancing from Crimea in the south and the Donbas in the east. The initial push towards the capital met fierce Ukrainian resistance, logistical challenges, and eventually led to a Russian withdrawal from the Kyiv region by April 2022. The discovery of atrocities in places like Bucha after the Russian retreat further highlighted the brutality of the conflict and prompted widespread international condemnation.

Data of over 530 million Facebook users was leaked online due to insecure cloud storage of public profile data. Update, June 22, 2025: This story, originally published on June 18, has been updated to include details of how to switch from passwords to the much more secure passkey technology if you are an Apple, Facebook or Google user. There is now also additional input from cybersecurity professionals regarding the 16 billion credentials mother of all leaks, including clarification regarding the legitimacy of the data leaked and the services impacted. This is a constantly evolving story, and I will do my best to keep the coverage here up to date. If you thought that my May 23 report, confirming the leak of login data totaling an astonishing 184 million compromised credentials, was frightening, I hope you are sitting down now. Researchers have just confirmed what could be the largest leak ever, with an almost incredulous 16 billion login credentials, including passwords, exposed. As part of an ongoing investigation that started at the beginning of the year, the researchers have postulated that the massive password leak is the work of multiple infostealers.

One of the most devastating hurricanes in U.S. history, Katrina caused 1,800 deaths and massive flooding in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina was a powerful, devastating and historic tropical cyclone that caused 1,392 fatalities and damages estimated at $125 billion in late August 2005, particularly in the city of New Orleans and its surrounding area. It is tied with Hurricane Harvey as being the costliest tropical cyclone in the Atlantic basin. Katrina was the twelfth tropical cyclone, the fifth hurricane, and the third major hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was also the fourth-most intense Atlantic hurricane to make landfall in the contiguous United States, gauged by barometric pressure. Katrina formed on August 23, 2005, with the merger of a tropical wave and the remnants of a tropical depression. After briefly weakening to a tropical storm over south Florida, Katrina entered the Gulf of Mexico on August 26 and rapidly intensified to a Category 5 hurricane before weakening to a Category 3 at its landfall on August 29 near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana.

A powerful computer worm believed to be developed by the U.S. and Israel to target Iran’s nuclear facilities. Stuxnet is a powerful computer worm designed by U.S. and Israeli intelligence that to disable a key part of the Iranian nuclear program. Targeted at an air-gapped facility, it unexpectedly spread to outside computer systems, raising a number of questions about its design and purpose. It’s now widely accepted that Stuxnet was created by the intelligence agencies of the United States and Israel. Stuxnet was first identified by the infosec community in 2010, but development on it probably began in 2005. The U.S. and Israeli governments intended Stuxnet as a tool to derail, or at least delay, the Iranian program to develop nuclear weapons. The Bush and Obama administrations believed that if Iran were on the verge of developing atomic weapons, Israel would launch airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities in a move that could have set off a regional war. Operation Olympic Games was seen as a nonviolent alternative. Although it wasn’t clear that such a cyberattack on physical infrastructure was even possible, there was a dramatic meeting in the White House Situation Room late in the Bush presidency during which pieces of a destroyed test centrifuge were spread out on a conference table. It was at that point that the U.S. gave the go-head to unleash the malware.

Improperly stored ammonium nitrate exploded at the port of Beirut, killing over 200 people and displacing thousands. On 4 August 2020, a major explosion occurred in Beirut, Lebanon, triggered by the ignition of 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate. The chemical, confiscated in 2014 from the cargo ship MV Rhosus and stored at the Port of Beirut without adequate safety measures for six years, detonated after a fire broke out in a nearby warehouse. The explosion resulted in at least 218 fatalities, 7,000 injuries, and approximately 300,000 displaced individuals, alongside property damage estimated at US$15 billion. The blast released energy comparable to 1.1 kilotons of TNT, ranking it among the most powerful non-nuclear explosions ever recorded and the largest single detonation of ammonium nitrate. The explosion generated a seismic event measuring 3.3 in magnitude, as reported by the United States Geological Survey. Its effects were felt in Lebanon and neighboring regions, including Syria, Israel, and Cyprus, over 240 km (150 mi) away. Scientific studies noted that the shockwave temporarily disrupted Earth's ionosphere.[2][3][4] Adjacent grain silos at the Port of Beirut sustained major damage. Portions of the silos collapsed in July and August 2022 following fires caused by remaining grain stocks.

WannaCry ransomware infected over 230,000 computers worldwide, disrupting hospitals, businesses, and public infrastructure. The WannaCry ransomware attack was a worldwide cyberattack in May 2017 by the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm, which targeted computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system by encrypting data and demanding ransom payments in the form of Bitcoin cryptocurrency.[4] It was propagated using EternalBlue, an exploit developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for Microsoft Windows systems. EternalBlue was stolen and leaked by a group called The Shadow Brokers (TSB) a month prior to the attack. While Microsoft had released patches previously to close the exploit, much of WannaCry's spread was from organizations that had not applied these patches, or were using older Windows systems that were past their end of life. These patches were imperative to cyber security, but many organizations did not apply them, citing a need for 24/7 operation, the risk of formerly working applications breaking because of the changes, lack of personnel or time to install them, or other reasons.

Rampant deforestation and fires in the Amazon rainforest raised global concern over environmental and climate impact. The Amazon rainforest, historically fire-resistant, is experiencing an alarming increase in wildfires due to climate extremes and human activity. The 2023/2024 drought, surpassing previous records, combined with forest fragmentation, has dramatically heightened fire vulnerability. Analysing the Tropical Moist Forest (TMF) and Global Wildfire Information System (GWIS) datasets, we found a 152 % surge in forest disturbances in 2024, reaching a two-decade peak of 6.64 million hectares. Forest degradation, particularly large-scale degradation linked to fires, increased by over 400 %, largely exceeding deforestation. Brazil and Bolivia experienced the most severe impacts, with Bolivia seeing 9 % of its intact forest burned in 2024. Pan-Amazon fire-driven forest degradation released 643 million tons of CO2 in 2024, a seven-fold increase from the previous two years. The escalating fire occurrence, driven by climate change and unsustainable land use, threatens to push the Amazon towards a catastrophic tipping point. Urgent, coordinated efforts are crucial to mitigate these drivers and prevent irreversible ecosystem damage.

Sri Lanka faced a severe economic crisis with food shortages, power cuts, and mass protests leading to leadership change. Sri Lanka had been earmarked for sovereign default, as the remaining foreign exchange reserves of US$1.9 billion as of March 2022 would not be sufficient to pay the country's foreign debt obligations for 2022, with $4 billion to be repaid. An International Sovereign Bond repayment of $1 billion was due to be paid by the government in July 2022. Bloomberg reported that Sri Lanka had a total of $8.6 billion in repayments due in 2022, including both local debt and foreign debt. In April 2022, the Sri Lankan government announced that it was defaulting, making it the first sovereign default in Sri Lankan history since its independence in 1948 and the first state in the Asia-Pacific region to enter sovereign default in the 21st century