Most cyber risk registers are useless compliance documents.

They contain vague descriptions, unverifiable controls, and no honest assessment of likelihood or impact.

A working risk register has exactly seven columns: specific risk scenarios, likelihood based on real UK statistics, quantified impacts including business closure potential, verifiable current controls, residual risk ratings, costed additional controls, and named board-level owners.

Every UK SME must address five mandatory risks: phishing (85% of breaches), ransomware, supply chain compromise, insider threats, and cloud misconfiguration.

Ten critical technical controls cover 90% of actual threats. Implementation costs £150-300 per user annually. One prevented £3,398 breach pays for years of protection.

After this week's podcast revelation about the marketing agency losing client files through an unsecured printer, my inbox has been full of variations on the same question: how do intelligent business owners with otherwise solid security miss something this obvious?

The answer isn't comfortable, but it's important: IoT security failures aren't about lack of intelligence. They're about systematic psychological blind spots that affect everyone from small business owners to government departments.

Former UK Government analyst reveals the cognitive biases costing UK businesses millions and, more importantly, how to overcome them before your next security decision. Understanding the psychology prevents the breach.

Here's a question for your weekend: Did anyone ask if UK small businesses wanted to fund Microsoft's nuclear reactor restart?

Because that's what's happening. While Microsoft spends $1.6 billion restarting Three Mile Island, Google partners with Kairos Power for small modular reactors, and Amazon secures nuclear capacity across multiple projects, your cloud bills are climbing to pay for it.

Nobody took a vote. Nobody asked permission. Tech giants made a collective decision that AI is worth unlimited energy consumption, and UK SMBs are involuntary investors in that bet. Let's talk about that.