Cyber Security News and Information from Commonwealth Sentinel

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 […]

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 […]