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Showing posts with the label SOC

UK Cybercrime Journal: Inside the Cl0p attack on South Staffs Water

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  What Happened: On 11 May 2026, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined South Staffordshire Water £963,900 after the Cl0p ransomware group lurked completely undetected in its network for nearly two years. Initial access reportedly occurred via a malicious phishing email in September 2020, which downloaded Cl0p’s Get2Loader malware and their SDBBOT backdoor to establish persistence. The breach itself, however, was only discovered two years later in July 2022 when staff began investigating IT performance slowdowns and  ultimately found out that 4.1 terabytes of data was exfiltrated and the personal data of 633,887 customers and employees being published in August 2022 on Cl0p’s Tor data leak site. The ICO’s investigation also revealed a staggering list of systemic failures, such as  South Staff’s outsourced Security Operations Center (SOC) was blind to 95% of the network and that they conducted zero internal or external vulnerability scans over an 18-month win...

Lessons from the BlackBasta Ransomware Attack on Capita

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Introduction When a company that manages data for millions of UK citizens falls victim to ransomware, the whole industry should pay attention to it. On 15 October 2025, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) published a detailed 136 page report about the Capita breach.  The aim of this blog is to extract actionable cybersecurity lessons from the ICO’s findings as well as open source reports surrounding the breach from a cyber threat intelligence (CTI) analyst’s perspective to help SOC and CERT teams, and CISOs understand what happened and how to avoid the mistakes made by others. BLUF Incident Impact Summary: Capita was attacked by BlackBasta ransomware in March 2023 Over six million individual’s records were exfiltrated from Capita’s systems A £14 million fine was issued to Capita by the ICO Capita said in May 2023, the incident cost up to £20 million to recover Important context about Capita The Capita Group is a business process outsourcing (BPO) and professional servic...

Strengthening Threat Hunting Programs - Part 1: Requests for Threat Hunts

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  This is the first part of a threat hunting blog series I want to start. I plan to share some insights on several related ideas such as risk hunting, incident-based hunting, and leveraging a system similar to requests for intelligence (RFIs) in cyber threat intelligence (CTI) but for threat hunting. These ideas and concepts came to me from creating and running a professional threat hunting program over the course of more than two years, from early 2022 to mid 2024. In this blog are many of the lessons I have learned in my time venturing on this journey. If you are just looking for some threat hunting resources in general, please find this collection on my GitHub I’ve compiled and were helpful to me during my journey. Introduction If you are like myself and have been generating and disseminating cyber threat intelligence (CTI) for many years, it may be an obvious choice to transition into a role whereby you consume and leverage it. Threat Hunting is an activity that experien...