Cyber Security News and Information from Commonwealth Sentinel

A small health care practice in a Kentucky county seat lost access to its patient records on a Monday morning last winter. The front desk could not pull up a single chart. Appointments backed up into the parking lot. The office manager told me later that she had always assumed criminals went after the big […]

Picture the hackers. If a teenage boy in a dark bedroom came to mind, hood up, soda cans on the floor, you are not alone. That image has been marketed to us for thirty years.It is also mostly wrong, and believing it can cost a small business or a county office real money. I have […]

In April, Chelan County, Washington, shut down its entire network, phone lines, and public websites after a malware attack, and officials had no timeline for when normal service would return. That is not a hypothetical scenario from a conference slide. That is six months into 2026, and it is one of 10 stories that tell […]

Last winter, a nonprofit food pantry director in a town of about 6,000 people called me after what could have been a very bad week. Someone had impersonated her board chair in an email and asked the bookkeeper to transfer $4,200 to a new account. The bookkeeper, who works two jobs and answers emails between […]

A few years ago, I sat across from a senior statewide school administrator, a man whose decisions shaped policy for K-12 schools across the Commonwealth, and explained, plainly, that schools are targets for cyber criminals. He would not have it. Schools, he told me, had nothing a criminal would want. No money to speak of, […]

Incident response (IR): iAn organization’s structured approach to detecting, managing, and recovering from cybersecurity threats and data breaches aims to limit attack damage, minimize business disruption, and prevent future incidents. The owner of a family-run building supply company in a Kentucky town of about nine thousand got to the store a little before seven. She […]