Cyber Security News and Information from Commonwealth Sentinel

On August 20, the Federal Trade Commission put out a short consumer alert about a package. Not a data breach, not a ransomware crew, not a foreign intelligence service. A package. Baby wipes, maybe, or toothpaste, or a small envelope of flower seeds. It shows up at your door with your name and address on […]

Hackers reached critical infrastructure in at least a dozen states in under two weeks. Kentucky’s small utilities should assume they are on the same list. In late July, the Clayton County Water Authority outside Atlanta watched its water pressure fall. The authority serves about 300,000 people. It issued a boil water advisory. A broken main […]

In April 2026, the FBI released its Internet Crime Report for 2025. For the first time in the report’s nearly 25 years, it carried a section on artificial intelligence. The number attached to it was 22,364 complaints and close to $893 million in losses. That sits inside a much larger total of $20.9 billion lost […]

Cyber attack readiness is not a document. It is a set of decisions you make before a cyber attack. A few months ago, I sat in a county office with a clerk who had a binder on her shelf labeled “Emergency Plan.” She pulled it down and blew the dust off the cover. Inside was […]

In a field drowning in initials, vCISO is the one that can save a small organization real money At a charity lunch this spring, a woman who runs a twelve-person insurance agency slid a vendor proposal across the table to me. She had circled seven acronyms on the first page alone. MFA. EDR. SIEM. SOC. […]

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 […]