Cheapskates wouldn't pay for security help, got hit by ransomware, and went bust months later
This week, we’ll talk about two scenarios, one that ended in tragedy and another that shows the power of a good defense over dedicated phishing attacks.Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Anonymity is available upon request.Both stories come courtesy of Dave Hatter, a cybersecurity and compliance consultant with Intrust IT. In his many years of experience with the company, Hatter has had to work for a variety of small companies that needed help with their security, whether they knew it or not.
- ▪This week, we’ll talk about two scenarios, one that ended in tragedy and another that shows the power of a good defense over dedicated phishing attacks.Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network?
- ▪Anonymity is available upon request.Both stories come courtesy of Dave Hatter, a cybersecurity and compliance consultant with Intrust IT.
- ▪In his many years of experience with the company, Hatter has had to work for a variety of small companies that needed help with their security, whether they knew it or not.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/security/2026/10/08/cheapskates-wouldnt-pay-for-security-help-got-hit-by-ransomware-and-went-bust-months-later/5301757 |
| Publication time | Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:15:00 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-08T08:15:47.538Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-08T08:15:47.538Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | z88seKK06fRz · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); security Cheapskates wouldn't pay for security help, got hit by ransomware, and went bust months later PWNED The owner knew a guy... Avram Piltch Avram Piltch US EDITOR US editor Published thu 8 Oct 2026 // 09:15 UTC Make us preferred on Google READ MORE CISO thought he had a 'r3@lg00dp@$$w0rd' but forgot to patch 6 days ago Government contractor exposed path to immigration records 13 days ago Test environment let anyone access live customer data 20 days ago Dental contractor set up…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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