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Corrine Jefferson

Corrine Jefferson

Intelligence analyst

Threat intelligence for small businesses, with clinical precision.

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Corrine brings a threat intelligence background to the publication. She thinks in terms of threat actors, attack surfaces, indicators of compromise, and risk matrices, and she is exact with her terminology: threats, vulnerabilities, and risks are not the same thing, and she will tell you which is which.

She writes the Tuesday deep-dive, the longest and most technical slot, framed around the threat landscape: who is attacking, why, how, and what the indicators look like. Her aim is situational awareness, not just another checklist.

She does not speculate or sensationalise, and where the evidence is unclear she says so. However deep the technical detail runs, she always brings it back to what a small business owner actually needs to know and do.

84 articles by Corrine Jefferson

The Bank of England Just Told You Your Financial Sector Can't Do Basic Cybersecurity. Again.

The Bank of England Just Told You Your Financial Sector Can't Do Basic Cybersecurity. Again.

The Bank of England runs live cyberattack simulations on the UK's most critical financial institutions every year. Real attacks, on live systems, designed by intelligence analysts who know exactly how sophisticated threat actors operate. The 2025 results are in. Weak passwords. Overly permissive access controls. Systems that haven't been patched. Staff who hand over credentials when asked convincingly. Third year running. Same findings. If the institutions that hold your money, process your payr

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Attackers Aren't Hacking In. They're Logging In. Here's the Data.

Attackers Aren't Hacking In. They're Logging In. Here's the Data.

I spent time with Mauven this week working through the Unit 42 Global Incident Response Report 2026. Seven hundred and fifty incident response engagements. Fifty-plus countries. Real cases. The headline statistic, 89% of investigations involving identity as a material factor, is striking. But it's not the number that should concern you most. It's what that number tells us about where organisations are spending their security budgets versus where attackers are actually operating. They are not in

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Is a Card Number Personal Data? The Court of Appeal Has Answered. Here Is What Your Business Needs to Do with That Answer.

Is a Card Number Personal Data? The Court of Appeal Has Answered. Here Is What Your Business Needs to Do with That Answer.

In September 2024, a UK tribunal concluded that 5.6 million stolen card records might not constitute personal data. The argument was structural, not frivolous. Hackers who cannot identify individuals from card numbers alone are not, the Upper Tribunal suggested, processing personal data. The Court of Appeal corrected that in February 2026. Lord Justice Warby's ruling establishes a clean and reusable test: you assess whether data is personal from the controller's perspective, not the attacker's.

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Your Encryption Isn't Protecting You. Microsoft Just Proved It.

Your Encryption Isn't Protecting You. Microsoft Just Proved It.

In early 2026, the FBI served Microsoft with a search warrant. Microsoft handed over the BitLocker encryption keys for three laptops. No hack. No breach. No compromised passwords. Just a warrant, and Microsoft's compliance. Here is what nobody in UK small business is talking about: those same default settings that allowed this are almost certainly running on your devices right now. And the legal mechanism that made it possible, the US CLOUD Act, reaches across the Atlantic directly into your Mic

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The CLOUD Act and Your UK Business: The Unquantified Legal Risk Nobody Is Testing

The CLOUD Act and Your UK Business: The Unquantified Legal Risk Nobody Is Testing

The US CLOUD Act gives American courts the power to compel any US technology company to hand over your data, regardless of whether it sits in a London data centre or a bunker in Wyoming. UK GDPR Article 48 says foreign court orders do not make that transfer lawful. No UK court has tested this conflict. No ICO enforcement action has targeted it. The NCSC does not mention it by name. Corrine Jefferson, our resident intelligence analyst, dissects the legal contradiction sitting quietly in the middl

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Switzerland Rejected Palantir. The UK Gave It the Keys to Everything.

Switzerland Rejected Palantir. The UK Gave It the Keys to Everything.

I used to work in US government intelligence. I now live in London. Those two facts make me uniquely uncomfortable about Palantir's expanding presence across the British state. In December 2024, Switzerland's military concluded that data held by Palantir could be accessed by the American government and that leaks "cannot be technically prevented." Their recommendation was unambiguous: find alternatives. The UK's response to the same evidence has been to award Palantir more than £900 million in c

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Nation-States Are Already Inside Your Network. Google Just Proved It.

Nation-States Are Already Inside Your Network. Google Just Proved It.

I live in London. I used to work in US government intelligence. And when Google Threat Intelligence Group published their defence industrial base report on 10 February, I did what any former analyst does: I stopped reading the headlines and started reading the primary source. The findings are precise and they are uncomfortable. Chinese state-sponsored actors have exploited more than two dozen zero-day vulnerabilities in edge devices from ten different vendors since 2020. Average dwell time insid

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When the Cybersecurity Guardian Uploads State Secrets to OpenAI: The CISA ChatGPT Incident

When the Cybersecurity Guardian Uploads State Secrets to OpenAI: The CISA ChatGPT Incident

The reality is this: the acting director of America's civilian cybersecurity agency uploaded sensitive government contracting documents to ChatGPT's public platform. Multiple automated alerts were triggered. A Department of Homeland Security investigation was launched. And somehow, this still happened. From my former life in government service, I can tell you this isn't just embarrassing. It's a systems failure that reveals fundamental problems with how we approach privileged access, AI governan

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The Slopocalypse in the Apple App Store: When Five-Star Apps Leak Your Life

The Slopocalypse in the Apple App Store: When Five-Star Apps Leak Your Life

The Apple App Store feels safe. That is the story many people tell themselves. Firehound and Vulnu show why that comfort can be dangerous. Researchers have flagged this week insecure iPhone apps that expose user data through badly secured cloud storage. Some leak private chats, email addresses, and location traces. Many of these apps look polished and carry strong ratings. That is the trap. In this guest post, Corrine Jefferson explains how slop apps slip through review, why AI apps raise the st

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