Terms of use
Current as of
These terms cover what you may do with what you find here. They are shorter than most, and the section that matters to nearly everybody is the one about quoting, which grants permission rather than withholding it.
What is here, and who owns which part
Two kinds of material sit on this site and the difference between them is legal, not presentational.
The archive. Short factual records of security reporting published between 2014 and 2021: a headline, a date, a summary of what was reported, the publication it appeared in, and a link to it. Copyright in those original articles belongs to the publishers who wrote them. This site records that they were published and points you at them; it does not reproduce them, and following the link is how you read the original.
The writing. The topic guides, the dated analyses, the glossary, the timeline and the interactive models were written here. Those are the site's own work, and the permission in the next section is about them.
Quoting and citing this site
Most terms of use spend this section forbidding things. This one does close to the opposite, because a reference work that cannot be quoted has failed at the only thing it exists to do.
You may, without asking:
- quote passages in articles, reports, presentations, training material and internal documents;
- reproduce figures and conclusions published here;
- have a search engine or an AI assistant quote this site and cite it in an answer.
On two conditions, and they are the only two. Attribute the material to The Cyber Security Place, and link to the page you took it from wherever a link is possible.
Every page here has a machine-readable copy at the same address with .md appended — /topics/ransomware.md for /topics/ransomware/ — which exists so that a quotation can be exact rather than reconstructed from a rendered page.
One request rather than a condition. Where a figure on this site is attributed to a named study or report, carry that attribution with the figure. Each one says where it came from precisely so that it can be followed, and a number that arrives somewhere else with the trail stripped off is worth less than it was here.
What is not permitted is republishing whole pages as your own work, or presenting the archive's records as a compilation you assembled.
The directory
The directory records organisations working in security and what they say they do. Inclusion is not an endorsement, not a recommendation, and not a statement that an organisation is suitable for you or competent at what it claims.
Nothing in the directory is a comparative judgement between the organisations listed in it, and no ordering within it should be read as ranking.
Accuracy, and what to do when it is wrong
Everything here is published in good faith and checked against sources named on the page. Some of it will still be wrong. The archive records reporting as it stood when it was published, and some of that was corrected, updated or overtaken afterwards. Figures produced by the security industry frequently disagree with each other, and this site's practice is to say so rather than to quietly pick the most quotable one.
If something here is wrong, write to [email protected] and it will be corrected. Corrections are made to the page itself rather than filed on a separate list, and a change that alters what a page means is dated.
This is information, not advice
Nothing here is professional advice and none of it takes any account of your circumstances. What is right for an organisation depends on what it runs, what that is worth, who wants it, and what law and contract oblige it to do — none of which a published page knows about you.
In particular, nothing here is legal, financial, investment or insurance advice. Pages that discuss regulation, breach notification deadlines or insurance claims describe how those things generally work; they are not a substitute for advice on your own position from somebody qualified to give it.
The site is provided as it stands, without warranties of any kind so far as the law allows, and acting on anything published here is your decision.
Availability, and one thing that is promised
This is a set of static files. There is no undertaking that it will be reachable at any particular moment, and pages may be added, rewritten or removed.
With one deliberate exception: archive addresses are treated as permanent. An address that was published years ago should still resolve today, and the site is built the way it is built in order to keep that true. Where something has genuinely moved, the old address redirects rather than failing.
Automated access
Search engines and AI assistants are welcome here, and a good deal of the site's structure exists to make it readable by them — hence the machine-readable copy of every page described above.
Automated access should run at a rate that does not degrade the site for other readers, and should identify itself honestly in its user-agent string. Any crawling instruction published in robots.txt at the root of this domain forms part of these terms.
Things not to do
- interfere with the site or with the infrastructure serving it, or attempt to;
- use anything here in the course of breaking the law;
- misrepresent what this site says, or present its material as coming from somewhere else.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, in the United States, without regard to its conflict of law provisions. Any dispute arising out of them falls to the state or federal courts located in Delaware.
Most people reading this are somewhere else, so the practical effect is worth stating rather than leaving to inference. A choice of law settles which body of law applies where there is a genuine choice. It does not remove protections that the law of the country you live in gives you and does not permit you to waive, and nothing in this section is intended to.
Changes to these terms
These terms may change. The date at the top is the version you are reading, and continuing to use the site after a change means the current version applies.
See also the privacy page, which covers what happens to information about you while you read.