We are often told that security is a game of when, not if - data breaches and cyber attacks for a long time have not been a roll of the dice but instead, a ticking clock. Cybercrime is such a lucrative and somewhat untraceable activity that the cross-hairs do not discriminate.

With all the headline breaches focusing on the more high profile victims of cyber breaches, you could be forgiven for thinking that the SMB sector is overlooked by hackers in favour of the big prize targets such as Ashley Madison, Three Mobile, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn and Target. That isn’t the case, SMB’s are in fact taking the brunt of cyber-attacks and in some cases providing a route into the bigger high profile targets…

As the Internet continues to be an important part of our lives, it also becomes a more dangerous avenue for cybercrime. The risk increases as the massive online community’s use of the Internet becomes more rampant. And despite the public being aware of cybersecurity issues, anonymous online criminals are able find more victims and creative ways to commit Internet fraud with the use of Internet services or software programs with web access.

2017 may be remembered as the year of the botched cyber heist, when mass infections of ransomware variants embarrassed some of the world's largest and most famous organisations but earned their creators little more than notoriety. With mystery surrounding identity and motive, we may never get to the bottom of the full story but we may be able to draw some conclusions by following the money.

If there was a person in the world who didn’t know what ransomware was, they probably do now. On Friday the 12^th of May 2017, what was initially dismissed as an issue on NHS (National Health Service) England’s IT system quickly developed into a global incident involving computers, laptops and servers in 150 (and still counting) countries.

2016 will be written in the history books as a turbulent twelve months. One which saw large fluctuations in currency values, a fall in the price of oil, the political fallout of Brexit, India’s savage attempt to reduce corrupt payments, the tussling of the election of the President of the United States, endless record busting data breaches and denial of service attacks affecting entire geographical regions.