The upcoming Swedish Cybersecurity Act, which is based on the EU's NIS2 Directive, is often described as yet another heavy burden on organizations. But I would like to challenge that view. In fact, this law could mark the beginning of a new era: one in which cybersecurity is no longer a side issue, but a strategic opportunity and a key to competitiveness.

On August 23, 2025, IT supplier Miljödata AB was hit by a major cyberattack that knocked out important HR systems in over 160 Swedish municipalities and several regions. Miljödata supplies the Adato rehabilitation and HR system, which is used by 80% of Sweden's municipalities. The attack resulted in the theft of personal data for over one million Swedish citizens—including names, personal identification numbers, addresses, and contact details—linked to employees in municipalities such as Stockholm, Gothenburg, Linköping, and others.

Cloudflare is a linchpin of the modern Internet’s infrastructure, yet its “content-neutral” stance has repeatedly allowed phishing, malware, and extremist sites to hide behind its network. Security researchers warn that about 10.05% of all spam/malicious domains use Cloudflare’s nameservers, and that attackers routinely move flagged domains behind Cloudflare to “disguise the backend.” 

Our previous articles on Cloudflare have highlighted how the company's global infrastructure can, paradoxically, protect cybercriminals and how Cloudflare's own processes fall short when it comes to dealing with abuse. We have seen that Cloudflare's free platforms for pages and scripts are widely used for phishing and spreading malware, and that abuse reports are often met with automatic rejections instead of swift action. Critics have pointed to a ‘blind spot’ at Cloudflare: that the company's enormous reach and business model sometimes outweigh proactive security.

Cloudflare sits behind one in five websites, promising speed, and security. But the same infrastructure now hides an industrial scale phishing economy. For six (6) months we tracked more than +600 fake tiquetesbaratos.com fraud domains - multiple hosted on pages.dev or workers.dev and fraud domains levering the Cloudflare reverse-proxy DNS services. Abuse reports met the same copy paste dismissal: “Unable to confirm phishing.” This article investigates why Cloudflare’s processes fail, how that failure fuels criminals, and what lawmakers must do next.

What is new since Excedo’s October 2024 primer on KYC for domain name registrants? Why Article 28 still matters.

The NIS2 Directive places new requirements on domain name registrars to get accurate information on registrants in order to minimise the anonymity that enables cybercrime.

The requirements of the NIS2 Directive are extensive and address many different aspects of digital security, including email security. For organizations to meet the email security standards set by NIS2, they need a correctly configured DMARC policy.

The NIS2 Directive will raise digital security levels across the EU. Although its jurisdiction spans across borders, individual countries have a say in how the requirements will be implemented locally and if they want to go above and beyond the security baseline set by NIS2.