John E. Dunn

John Dunn has been covering the IT industry for more than 30 years, specializing in cybersecurity, mobile, cloud, privacy, and networking. His work has appeared in numerous tech titles, including Computerworld, PC World, The Register, Which Computing, Forbes, and Naked Security. In 2003, he co-founded IDG's Techworld.
Recent posts by John E. Dunn

Around a decade ago, the bad people who make ransomware had an idea that proved so successful it helped fuel a crime boom that still haunts us to this day: hide the technical complexity of ransomware behind simple web platforms so that any criminal can launch attacks. Better known as ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), after a slow […]

On October 28, 2023, the British Library in London was hit by a devastating ransomware attack that ended up causing months of disruption to the venerable institution’s services. We’ve covered this story before, both the incident itself and the unusually frank post-incident lessons learned report published by the Library in March. We later learned that […]

On May 7 2024, almost five years after it first appeared, the LockBit ransomware group finally got a human face. His name is Dmitry Khoroshev (aka ‘LockBitSupp’), alleged by the FBI and UK National Crime Agency (NCA) to be the platform’s administrator, the powerful figure who helped direct it to attack at least 7,000 organizations […]

If you’re a seasoned watcher of cybersecurity incidents, you’ll doubtless have heard an unhappy tale that’s similar to the following story many times before. In February 2024, hackers used compromised credentials to breach a Citrix desktop remote access portal belonging to a large company. Once inside the network, they moved laterally, opening a path for […]

Every organization that suffers a serious ransomware attack faces years of financial pain and reputational damage, or at least this is what we’re often told. While it’s true that the short-term costs of ransomware can be steep, there is less evidence about the longer-term costs that might follow behind. One measure is the effect on […]

Cybercriminals, it is widely observed, have a fondness for weekends. This is not by chance—at weekends organizations are short-staffed, making this the best time to launch a cyberattack. It’s a pattern that played out in a ransomware attack on the Romanian health system on Sunday, Feb. 11, that sent some of the country’s most important […]