Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

For most small businesses, outsourcing business IT support gives more cover for less money than hiring your own IT person. Some firms prefer to keep IT in-house for direct control, and many larger ones combine their own team with a provider, an approach called co-managed IT. The choice affects more than your IT bill. It decides who spots problems and fixes them, and whether your IT knowledge stays with the business when someone leaves.

Every business with a website or email accounts has weak spots, and penetration testing helps you find them before an attacker does. Security experts try to break in the way a real hacker would, so you can see whether your defences hold up. The test itself is only the start. How often you test and what happens with what the testers find, decides whether a report makes you any safer. Both are worth knowing before you compare penetration testing services.

On 21 October 2026, two critical vulnerabilities in PHP, known collectively as PHP2Shell, prompted urgent security warnings from the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and other cybersecurity authorities. Tracked as CVE-2026-109168 and CVE-2026-109619, both vulnerabilities carry a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.2 and could allow unauthenticated attackers to execute malicious code remotely on vulnerable PHP servers.

A security operations centre (SOC) is the team that watches your systems around the clock and steps in when an attacker gets past your defences. Its job is to find intruders quickly and contain them before reaching anything critical. Few businesses have their own in-house SOC. Most get the same 24/7 cover from a managed SOC, run by a specialist provider. Either way, what happens in the first few hours of an attack determines how much damage is done.

When you are comparing managed service providers (MSPs), a monthly price per user is a useful starting point, but it rarely tells the whole story. If you take for example, a standard SME business with 25 employees, they could be charged anywhere between £9000-45,000 per year for outsourced IT support, before a single extra is added. That’s the varied range most MSPs will quote for per-user fees and on its own, tells you less than it seems to.

The ASOS cyber attack reported on 6 October 2026, has raised fresh questions about third-party access, SaaS security and how modern organisations manage an increasingly connected attack surface. The incident became public in an unusual way: customers received an unauthorised mobile push notification through the ASOS app claiming the retailer had been compromised. ASOS later confirmed that basic personal information, including names and contact details, may have been accessed.

G2 has named ThreatSpike a Leader in Managed Security Services (MSSP) in their Fall 2026 report, ranking as the vendor for the sixth time running since Summer 2025. The ThreatSpike reviews behind that ranking point at the same two things every time: we show up faster than everyone else, and we don’t disappear once the contract’s signed.

Network management gets its most significant expansion yet this month with a complete topology map, path tracing, switch visualisation, syslog collection and more, all shipping together. Alongside it: a redesigned ticket status system, Credentials Manager updates, SQL Server metrics monitoring and more. Here’s everything that shipped.

AI is now in the pentest reporting workflow and plenty more updates from July. Ticketing gets even more updates, the Knowledge Base adds version control, and Fivetran connects to Job Monitoring. Here’s what shipped.

A lot moved across the platform in June. Ticketing becomes a proper collaborative workspace, SQL Server monitoring goes from basic to comprehensive, and the Knowledge Base gains the kind of permission controls and team features that make it genuinely useful at scale. Here’s everything that landed.