From PKI to Crypto-Agility: Building a Maturity Model for Digital Trust
Digital transformation has dramatically increased the number of identities organizations must secure - users, devices, applications, APIs, and workloads. At the heart of this trust ecosystem lies Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). But PKI alone is no longer enough. As highlighted in Excedo’s perspective on digital trust, certificate automation has become a business imperative, not just an IT improvement. With certificate lifespans shrinking and threats evolving rapidly, organizations must move beyond managing certificates to becoming crypto-agile. This blog explores what crypto-agility means, why it matters, and how organizations can evolve through a structured maturity journey.
Digital Trust Starts with PKI: Why Certificate Automation Is Now a Business Imperative
Digital trust underpins every modern business interaction, from customer-facing services to internal systems and partner integrations. At the core of this trust lies Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and the certificates that secure communication and verify identities. Yet, as digital environments grow more complex and certificate lifecycles continue to shrink, many organizations still rely on manual management processes. This creates hidden risks that can lead to unexpected outages, security gaps, and operational disruption. For business leaders, this is no longer just a technical concern - it is a matter of resilience, revenue protection, and maintaining customer trust. Automation is rapidly becoming essential to gaining control, reducing risk, and ensuring continuous digital operations.
Disruption Beats Registration: How £1 UK Companies Enable ASN Abuse at Scale
Cybercrime does not scale because attackers are sophisticated. It scales because the infrastructure they depend on is easy to obtain, cheap to operate, and even easier to replace. The industry has already learned this lesson at the domain level. Weak identity controls enabled large-scale abuse. The response was clear: blocking alone does not work. Real impact comes from disrupting infrastructure at the source. Now the same pattern is repeating itself - one layer deeper. Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) and IP address allocations are increasingly being used as the foundation for resilient cybercrime infrastructure. And the entry point is not technical, It is administrative.
Disruption beats listing: Why domain takedowns and enforcement stop cybercrime at the source
Phishing and domain-enabled fraud are not “edge cases” in today’s threat landscape - they are a primary entry point. reports that phishing remains the dominant initial intrusion vector in Europe, accounting for 60% of cases in the reporting period covered by the ENISA Threat Landscape 2025. Against that backdrop, most organisations still rely heavily on passive controls: email filtering, URL reputation checks, and third‑party abuse lists. These controls matter - but they do not end the threat. They flag malicious infrastructure; they do not remove it.
The new cybersecurity law – what the public sector needs to know
On 15 January 2026, Sweden's new Cyber Security Act (SFS 2025:1506) will come into force. The Act aims to achieve a high level of cyber security in society and implements the EU's NIS 2 Directive into Swedish law. This means that many organisations will face stricter requirements to improve their protection against cyber threats. The government has emphasised that municipalities and other organisations also need to ‘step up their game’ in their cybersecurity work – the new law will tighten the requirements for these actors. In this article, I summarise the purpose of the law, which public sector organisations are affected, the key obligations (particularly regarding security measures, incident reporting and training) and provide practical guidance ahead of its entry into force.
The Cybersecurity Act – from regulatory burden to competitive advantage
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.
Miljödatas leak reveals shortcomings in security management and procurement requirements
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’s Accountability Gap: How “Content Neutrality” Shields Crime
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.”
Cloudflare and NIS2: risks the public sector cannot afford to ignore
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’s Abuse Blind Spot: When Scale Outweighs Safety
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.
Navigating NIS2 Article 28 in mid 2025: The Importance of KYC for Domain Name Registrants
What is new since Excedo’s October 2024 primer on KYC for domain name registrants? Why Article 28 still matters.
Navigating NIS2 and Article 28: The Importance of KYC for Domain Name Registrants
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.
Email Security and NIS2: Why the Public Sector needs DMARC for NIS2 Compliance
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.
What you need to know about the NIS2 Directive in Sweden
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.
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