Threats — writing by Peter Bassill
Threats · page 4 of 5
Breaches, campaigns and the vulnerabilities being used right now. 67 articles
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SolarWinds at five
Five years on from the disclosure of the SolarWinds Orion compromise, what actually changed in how UK boards think about third-party software risk — and what did not. A practitioner's retrospective on the case study that defined the decade.
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The supplier underneath the supplier
Three disclosures last month tell the same story from three angles: NHS England's tech provider, an NHS GP software supplier, and the Foreign Office. None of them is the headline brand. All of them are where the actual attack surface lives.
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The incidents that do not make the papers
What three years on the CREST Incident Response Pan-Europe board has taught me about the work the headlines never cover, and the kind of firm a customer should actually want to be on the end of the phone with.
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From prepositioning to action
Iran has shifted its UK-facing cyber activity from quiet infrastructure presence to operational disruption. The NCSC's August advisory on Salt Typhoon names three Chinese firms. The trajectory of 2025 is no longer ambiguous.
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Synnovis, a year on
One year after the Qilin ransomware attack on Synnovis took NHS pathology services in south-east London offline, what did we actually learn — and what is still unfixed?
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What the retail wave actually cost
M&S resumed online orders this week after 46 days offline. Co-op is counting £206m. Harrods got off relatively lightly. Three compromises, one actor, one Easter weekend — and a lesson UK retail boards are still digesting.
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CrowdStrike: cyber resilience without a bad actor
Four weeks after the CrowdStrike Falcon update that took 8.5 million Windows machines offline, the post-mortem is in. The interesting question is not what CrowdStrike did wrong. It is what the rest of us did wrong by assuming this kind of event could not happen.
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Malware and the layered defence
Antivirus is necessary but not sufficient. The defence-in-depth approach that actually catches malware — and how it joins up with everything else we have done this year.
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Email is the front door: spotting phishing and stopping BEC
Over 90% of breaches begin with email. How to spot phishing, build a reporting culture, configure SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and prevent the single most expensive small business fraud: business email compromise.
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Operation Cronos: what disruption actually achieves
A month on from the NCA-led takedown of LockBit's infrastructure, the affiliate group is already back online and claiming new victims. What Operation Cronos achieved is real and worth defending — but it is not the dismantlement the headlines suggested.
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What a cyber attack actually costs a small business
The financial number is the smallest part. Operational disruption, reputational damage, and regulatory consequences are the costs that compound. Plus the positive case for getting this right.
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Know your enemy: the threats small businesses actually face
Phishing, ransomware, social engineering, malware, credential stuffing, insider mistakes, denial of service. The actual menu of threats facing UK small businesses — in plain English, without the drama.
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23andMe, and the data with the longest half-life
Last month 23andMe disclosed that attackers used credential stuffing against accounts opted in to relative-matching to scrape data on roughly 6.9 million people. The board lesson is about which data has the longest half-life — and it is not what most firms think.
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What the teenagers taught the Fortune 500
LAPSUS$ compromised Microsoft, Okta, Nvidia, Samsung, Vodafone, and several others in a few months. They were teenagers using social engineering and MFA fatigue. The lesson, awkwardly, is that the dominant compromise vector in 2022 is social, not technical.
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Log4Shell, and the inventory question we cannot keep ducking
A month on from CVE-2021-44228, the headline-grabbing exploits have slowed but the underlying problem has not. The discomfort of the past month was not really about Log4j. It was about how few firms could answer the question 'where is it running?'