Now, Guy Fawkes wasn’t a ‘modern-day’ hacker, but, if you squint, the Gunpowder Plot is a story about infiltration, hidden threats, and the thin line between luck and disaster – some may argue not too dissimilar to the playbook of today’s cyber adversaries.
The conspirators gained physical access to one of the most secure buildings in the land.
Quietly, he stockpiled barrels of explosive materials for months.
No one noticed until a warning letter tipped off the authorities.
Fast-forward four centuries, and for most businesses in 2025, luck isn’t a security strategy. Attackers no longer wheel barrels into cellars, but they do smuggle malware into networks, exfiltrate data unnoticed, and wait patiently until the timing is right. Ultimately, the principle is the same: once inside, immense damage is only one step away.
That’s why penetration testing matters. A pen test isn’t about fireworks – it’s about discovery. Instead of waiting for a bad actor to slip into your systems, pen testers act like the conspirators – probing weaknesses, looking for ways to bypass defences, and testing how far they can go before being noticed.
Unlike Guy Fawkes, however, pen testers are on your side, handing you a report when caught – not a lit fuse. Their ‘plots’ are carefully scoped, controlled, and documented to strengthen your defences, designed to help ask the uncomfortable but critical question of: “What if someone were to breach our ‘Parliament’”?
Just as Fawkes exploited access to Parliament’s weak spots, cyber attackers today exploit overlooked systems, default credentials, or unmonitored endpoints.
One warning letter in 1605 prevented a catastrophe. In modern cybersecurity, detection tools, threat intelligence, and red team exercises provide those early warnings.
Hoping you’ll ‘get the letter’ is not true resilience. Proactive pen testing is.
Every business has it’s own ‘Parliament’ to protect – critical infrastructure, customer trust and even intellectual property. Penetration testing ensures you don’t leave your security to luck and tip-offs.
In short, when it comes to cybersecurity, the smartest move is to search the cellar before someone else fills it with gunpowder.
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Not all change is progress.
Over the past 18 months, parts of the IT industry have been quietly rewriting the commercial rulebook. Several major vendors have shifted from perpetual licences to multi-year subscriptions, often accompanied by steep price rises and rigid terms.
The Procurement Act 2023 marks a fundamental shift in UK public procurement, replacing broad principles with a new regime of prescriptive transparency. For contracting authorities managing parts of the UK’s £385 billion annual public spend, this legislation introduces a series of legally mandated, data-intensive reporting obligations.
From NHS ransomware attacks to the Royal Mail being frozen out of global operations, cyber threats are no longer theoretical – they’re national disruptions. As attacks grow more targeted, stealthy, and sophisticated, the UK Government is taking a bold step to plug the legislative gaps and put resilience on the boardroom agenda.
It may come as a surprise, but most cyberattacks don’t happen at 10 am on a Tuesday.
More often, they happen when your teams are offline: when your SOC is running on minimal staffing, when an alert gets buried under hundreds of others.
AI adoption in IT is not uniform. The most advanced tools often require significant investment in licensing, infrastructure and integration. As a result, access to AI capabilities is often dictated by budget, not just technical readiness and expertise.
If your data is exposed on the dark web, but you don’t know about it – can you still be held accountable?
Like many industries and sectors, AI and automation are already changing the structure of IT teams. Routine operational work that used to be handled by junior engineers is increasingly carried out by intelligent systems. That work hasn’t disappeared, it’s just being done without human involvement.
The cyber threat landscape has shifted. Fast.
That means the traditional SOC, reliant on manual triage and static rule sets, is falling behind.
Enter the AI-powered SOC. Not just a nice-to-have, instead a necessary evolution in how we approach cyber defence.
Most organisations expect attacks to come from the outside: a malicious payload, a phishing email, a brute-force attempt at the firewall. But in many cases, the foundations of those attacks were laid weeks or months earlier – quietly, invisibly – through data already circulating on the dark web.