In troubled times – when faced with socio-economic uncertainty or political instability – organisations tend to pull in their horns, cut expenditure and save for the whatever the future holds. Cyber criminals love troubled times, because they know that organisations …

After a year of apparent inaction, the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) has struck twice in two days with the two largest privacy-related fines in the EU. I think organisations can draw two key lessons from these actions: 1. You can’t …

The City of Florida, after agreeing to spend $1 million (about £790,000) on new IT infrastructure after hackers captured their systems three weeks ago, has now agreed to pay $600k to get access to their systems. The ransomware was apparently …

For 7 months, cyber criminals had access to – and successfully exfiltrated – the extensive personal records of some 20 million US citizens. The American Medical Collections Agency had spent $1 million, as recently as 2015, upgrading and modernising its …

For those of you wonder what on earth the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office) is doing in terms of regulatory action in relation to privacy, their latest update identifies some recent financial penalties: A television production company was fined £20,000 for …

Last week in the US, a Georgia county paid a ransomware criminal $400,000 (about £302,000) to release its IT systems. The malware resulted in almost the entire local government system taken offline and processes revert to paper; officials decided that …

CyRiM’s (Cyber Risk Management Project) chilling report, Global infection by contagious malware , describes a scenario in which a well-resourced, motivated and malicious cyber team creates a self-replicating worm that encrypts all devices and wipes backups. I recently commented on what …