Cyber security predictions 2019: Watch for these four important Canadian privacy reports

The cyber security record book has closed on 2018, and what a ghastly year it was. It began with the acknowledgment of the Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities and ended with the revelation of an API vulnerability at Facebook and a huge breach at Marriott Hotels’ Starwood chain. In between — and this is only a partial list of publicly-disclosed international issues — a database with some 340 million records belonging to U.S. marketing and data aggregation firm data broker Exactis was discovered open to anyone; Twitter urged all of its more than 330 million users to immediately change their passwords after a bug exposed them in plain text; 150 million users of the food and nutrition application MyFitnessPal were told their usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords had been stolen; LocalBlox, a personal and business data search service, left a database exposed with 48 million records of detailed personal information on tens of millions of individuals and Ticketfly admitted names, addresses, email addresses and phone numbers connected to approximately 27 million accounts were accessed.