- The U.K. government is advancing plans to ban ransomware payments across the public sector and critical national infrastructure, such as the NHS, local councils and energy providers, expanding an existing ban on government departments.
- Despite a 35 percent decline in ransomware attacks in 2024, the National Cyber Security Centre warns the threat remains serious, citing recent attacks on Synnovis and the British Library as examples of ongoing disruption.
- The proposal includes a mandatory reporting system requiring victims to report ransomware incidents within 72 hours, as well as a potential prevention regime requiring non-covered entities to notify authorities if they intend to pay a ransom.
- Nearly 75 percent of respondents to a public consultation supported the ban and 63 percent backed mandatory reporting. However, opinions were divided on the appropriate penalties, with concerns about criminalizing victims.
- While penalties for non-compliance received general support, the Home Office is still evaluating whether they should be civil or criminal, aiming to balance enforcement with fairness to affected organizations.
(Natural News)—The U.K. government is pushing forward with plans to ban ransomware payments across the public sector and operators of critical national infrastructure.
Ransomware, a malicious software that locks users out of their systems until a ransom (often in cryptocurrency) is paid, remains one of the most disruptive cyber threats facing the United Kingdom. While recent data shows a decline in attacks, the threat persists. Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis reported a 35 percent drop in ransomware incidents last year compared to 2023. However, the National Cyber Security Center has warned that the threat remains immediate and disruptive.
The Annual Cyber Security Review, released in December 2024, cited several high-profile attacks as examples. A June 2024 ransomware incident targeting pathology lab Synnovis led to delays in elective procedures and outpatient appointments. A separate attack in October 2023 severely compromised the British Library’s digital systems.
Ransomware may have declined in volume, but the financial toll of cybercrime remains significant. A report in June by blockchain security firm CertiK found that wallet compromises and phishing attacks now account for the bulk of crypto-related losses. (Related: Ransomware gang claims responsibility for recent hacking incident against conservative newspaper The Washington Times.)
In line with this, the U.K. government proposed a plan on July 22 that would prohibit organizations such as the National Health Service, local councils and energy providers from paying ransoms to cybercriminals. The move, which follows a public consultation, was built on an existing ban already in place for central government departments.
The proposals include a new threshold-based reporting system. Under this system, any victim of a ransomware attack would be required to file an initial report within 72 hours, including key details of the incident, followed by a more detailed account within 28 days. The Home Office is also considering new requirements for businesses and organizations not covered by the ban. These would include a mandatory “prevention regime” obliging victims to notify the government if they intend to pay a ransom.
“Ransomware preys on businesses and disrupts vital public services like schools and hospitals. We must protect our economy against the criminals who hold organizations to ransom. I’ve announced our plan to target these criminal networks and smash the ransomware operating model,” said U.K. Security Minister Dan Jarvis.
U.K. ransomware payment ban gains broad support, but penalties spark debate
A clear majority supports the proposal to ban ransomware payments across public sector bodies and critical national infrastructure, but opinions are split on whether and how to penalize those who violate the rules. The consultation, which ran from Jan. 14 to April 8, drew 273 responses. Of those, 57 percent came from organizations, 39 percent from individuals and the remaining four percent from other groups.
According to the results, nearly 75 percent of respondents backed the proposed targeted ban, citing the need to curb the profitability of ransomware attacks that continue to disrupt vital public services. The consultation also revealed varying levels of support for related proposals.
A majority of 63 percent backed the introduction of a threshold-based mandatory reporting system. In contrast, only 41 percent supported retaining the current voluntary reporting framework. Opinions were more divided on the proposed prevention regime, with nearly half of respondents expressing support for an economy-wide ransomware payment ban, rather than limiting the measure to specific sectors.
However, views diverged sharply on what enforcement should look like. Respondents generally supported penalties for breaches across all three proposals, including the ransomware payment ban, a prevention regime for non-covered entities and mandatory reporting, but concerns were raised about the risk of “criminalizing victims.” Some respondents questioned whether penalties should be criminal or civil in nature, and warned of unintended consequences for businesses already grappling with cyberattacks.
The Home Office acknowledged the complexity, saying it would “continue to explore the most appropriate and proportionate penalties” in light of the mixed feedback.
Visit CyberWar.news for more similar stories. Watch the video below that talks about ransomware attacks, where victims are left without water or money access.
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- Was the FAA’s nationwide ground stop on flights last week the work of ransomware hackers?
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
