UK industry leaders unleash hurricane-grade scale for cyberattacks

The UK’s Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) launched a Saffir-Simpson-like 1–5 severity scale for systemic cyber events, scored by total financial impact and number of UK organizations affected, with thresholds from £10m–£5bn and 270–136,000 organizations; an expert committee will publish categorizations and rationale within 30–45 days to support insurers, policymakers, and the public. Back-testing examples rated the MOVEit data release as category 1, the Synnovis attack as 2, CrowdStrike’s outage as 3, and cited NotPetya as a category 5 exemplar, aiming to clarify systemic risk and reduce insurance litigation.