That Was The Cybercrime Awareness Month That Was, 2025 marks a 30th malware anniversary

Hopefully, by now, you will have noticed that October is/was Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Keen observers of this blog — we know there are some of you out there — will have noticed that we have not yet posted anything for this Cybersecurity Awareness month, other than some 'tweets' on Bluesky, like this: 

Cybersecurity awareness needs to include awareness of cybercrime
and its impact on human health

Or course, I did remind folks about the 31 articles on our Cybersecurity Awareness page. And rest assured, we have not lost interest in cybersecurity, or the need to raise awareness of its importance. However, three factors have been at work: 1/ Being unwell (Chey) and 2/ Caring for that unwell partner (Stephen) and 3/ A growing sense that in the cyber realm, crime is the thing about which more people need to be aware. For example:

1. How much cyber-related crime there is. (More that most folk realize.)
2. The extent to which the means, motive, and opportunity for crime are embedded in digital infrastructure. (Deeply.) 
3. How closely the tech boom is intertwined with the crime boom. (Very.)

Ironically, I had started doing some research on point #3 earlier in the year, starting in June. That's when I noticed July of 1995 was the month in which the first macro virus (Word Concept), was spotted in the wild. And while that sounds like a minor event, in fact, it heralded a massive increase in malicious code development and deployment. And this was all thanks to a foolish decision by young men too much in love with tech, money, and their own egos. (Hey AI fans, does that sound familiar?) Furthermore, that macro virus enabled some of the biggest cyber crime waves we've ever seen, up and including ransomware attacks in 2025.

In July, I dubbed this phenomenon 'macro gold' and set about publishing an article on it. My own ego thought it would be cool if I was the first person to highlight the 30th anniversary of the Word Concept first macro virus in the wild. I could then raise my profile as "veteran expert who warned us" by riding the ensuing wave of news coverage.

So much for egos, hopes, and dreams. My care duties kept interupting my research. My research revealed that the uncovering of the Word Concept macro virus was a slow process. Technically, it was spotted and documented in July (hat tip to Gordon and Ford and the legendary Wild List). However, it took months for the story to break beyond the tiny realm of antivirus researchers.

That fact actually helped me out because I could avoid feeling guilty for not getting my article out in July. But I didn't get it done in August eiter. I did manage to put Macro Gold up on Substack in September, but very few people noticed it, and continuing care commitments limited my ability to drum up interest. By the time October arrived and we entered Cybersecurity Awareness Month I was running low on energy and enthusiasm. 

As October ends, I note yet another news story highlighting the vulnerability of technology from Bill Gates company, notable Microsoft's cloud product Azure. This was to blame for global web service outages impacting Britain's biggest airport (Heathrow) and bank (NatWest), plus Minecraft and other big names. hitting over 1,000 companies and affecting millions of internet users." — BBC News

This followed news that AWS cloud services from the company built by fellow techbro billionaire Bezos had taken down "major social media platforms like Snapchat and Reddit, banks like Lloyds and Halifax, and games like Roblox and Fortnite." — BBC News

Another notable reminder of just how much crime our over-reliance on weak technology has enabled landed very close to my actual home this October: the criminal hacking of Jaguar Land Rover, a company synonymous with Coventry, the city in which I was born and now live. As Secure World's Cam Sivesind put it, this is "a chilling case study in the true cost of systemic risk—moving far beyond lost data to encompass crippling financial losses, manufacturing disruption, and supply chain contamination." — SecureWorld

As another annual cybersecurity awareness month comes to an end, let's hope the world will learn from the growing list of major cybercrimes, learn that they are rooted in:

• the failure of humans to exercise adequate care when developing and deploying technology, 
• a shortage of moral character that leads to the exploitation of technology for theft, fraud, and profiteering, and
• a huge cognitive gap that seems to stop humans heeding experts, over and over again.