Peter Bassill — latest writing on cyber security
Latest articles · page 7 of 14
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Things I wish boards would actually ask
Twelve questions that would tell you more than any maturity score. None of them mention zero-trust.
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Configure Fail2Ban: Protecting Linux Services from Brute Force
Install and configure Fail2Ban on Ubuntu to protect SSH, Apache and other services with rate-limiting and IP banning.
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April 2026, in retrospect
The worst single month for cyber attacks on record. 105 publicly disclosed ransomware incidents globally. The UK third by volume. Looking back at it with a week's distance, three patterns matter more than the count.
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The week in cyber — 4 to 8 May 2026
The ICO fined South Staffordshire Water nearly £1m, the DSIT cyber newsletter quietly confirmed the regulatory direction of travel, and the Canvas extortion played out on a public timeline.
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The £320 myth: what Cyber Essentials actually costs
Cyber Essentials is marketed from £320. For an unprepared 10-person UK business under the new v3.3 Danzell question set, the true first-year cost is £13,000 to £30,000 over 10 to 14 weeks. Here is the breakdown.
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The week in cyber — 27 April to 1 May 2026
A learning platform serving thirty million people was breached, cPanel disclosed a zero-day that had been live in the wild for months, and April closed as the worst month for ransomware on record.
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The week in cyber — 20 to 24 April 2026
NCSC and CISA named the Beijing-based outfit running covert botnets, the UK cyber chief told businesses to brace, and a sitting MP's website was hit with 142 million requests. A busy week.
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What it changed about my other machines
Last in the six-post series on the Covert Cyber Deck. The deck as catalyst, not destination — what designing and living with it changed about how I look at my work laptop, my home network, the firm's estate, and the boards I advise.
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Six years of EmilyAI: what we kept, what we changed, what we should have done sooner
Post 20 of the AI series. A longer reflective piece. Eight years on from the first sketch of the system that became EmilyAI, six years on from production deployment, the architectural retrospective the series has been building toward.
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Incident Response Planning for a Small Business Without a SOC
You do not need a security operations centre to have a plan. You need a single page, an out-of-band phone number, and a Saturday morning.
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Healthcare's reckoning
Three months of attacks have produced a clarifying set of numbers. £32.7m at Synnovis. 150,000 households warned at NHS Dumfries and Galloway. At least one patient death attributed. Healthcare is where concentration risk meets the lowest acceptable downtime threshold.
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In defence of writing the code yourself
On staying technical while sitting in chairs that don't expect you to be.
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What I got wrong
An honest account of the calls I have made in the past three years that did not land — what I was reading into the evidence that was not there, and what I would do differently.
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Living with it: the costs of offline-first
Post five of six on the Covert Cyber Deck. Honest notes on using the slate as a daily driver for several months. What I gave up. What surprised me. Where the bargain felt good and where it felt silly.
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Hardening Microsoft 365 for a Small Business
Most small businesses run Microsoft 365 and have never touched its security settings. This tutorial covers the controls that matter, in order of impact.