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TF your reply when i said i thought you had bought in was "No but I will when I see the consent and moves on the valuation front-I think the travel side has a chance at the risk of repeating myself" Why wait when you can have a good payday very soon?sell on the spike which there will be,then from there review whether you wish to buy as an investment.

hxxp://www.*************.com/views/29231/minoan-acquisition-placing-debt-update Minoan – acquisition, placing, debt update By Nigel Somerville | Monday 22 May 2017 AIM-listed travel agent and wannabe Greek holiday resort developer Minoan (MIN) announced a small bolt-on acquisition this morning….and a placing. Oh, and an update on its debt facility due to expire at the end of June. It is disappointing to see a placing (at 9p), but in the general scheme of things it is a relatively small amount so the pill is sugared to some extent. When I chatted to the company at the runaway success that was UK Investor Show on 1 April this year I came away thinking not just that the seemingly endless cycle of placings was at an end, but that we might even see some signs of profits and dividends before too long. So a placing at 9p, when the shares had been happily sitting at above 10p until last Friday (nothing to see here, move along please) is disappointing to see. Having said that, the balance sheet has tended to be somewhat thin on the cash front, with recently released FY numbers to 31 October 2016 showed cash of just £104,000 as against £145,000 the previous year so with ongoing plc costs and directors salaries as well as other bills to pay it seems that a fundraising was pretty much inevitable…..unless a rabbit appeared from the Minoan hat. That rabbit, I had hoped, would be the final long-awaited appearance of the Greek Supreme Court ruling on a final appeal by some who wish to have the Cavo Sidero project in northern Crete put on ice. The ruling still hasn’t appeared, although back on 1 April the company was clear that we could be waiting a couple of months for that. Time’s almost up, so one keeps on hoping for news very soon. That is the news I am waiting for, as I sense that the company has a string of deals lined up which will see cash flowing in once confirmation that Minoan has got the go-ahead (already reported in the Greek media) from the supreme court. But it sounds as though the Nomad WH Ireland has stepped in and “encouraged” the company to top up its coffers: As a consequence of the Acquisition and the Placing, which was done following advice from WH Ireland Limited…. So there we are, another 5 million golden tickets in circulation. Out of 211 million shares it is not a big dilution by any means so if it is enough to keep the lights on while we wait for the Greek bureaucratic wheels to turn then we just have to swallow it. The bolt-on acquisition - Morningside (read poshville in Edinburgh) Travel Limited for £135,000 - is pretty small, but if it brings the break-even mark a little closer then all well and good. Finally, we are told that discussions to extend an existing loan facility (already extended to 30 June) are ongoing and we will be updated “in due course”. Thanks for that….. Overall the investment case for Minoan is prett

Prevent malware execution – (a) The manufacture said if we install anything on the box it will crash. (b) we tried, it crashed, (c) We tried, it didn’t crash So let’s look at 4c for a minute. According to the cyber security vendor world they all have a product that would have stopped WannaCry and any other unknown malware dead in its tracks. Sounds great. First problem…. These tools hook the kernel and or low level drivers and end up interfering with any number of things they haven’t been tested with, say for instance like a very specific piece of MRI scanner software, of which there are only 34 copies installed in the UK. Second problem, let’s assume that it works with everything and really is the answer…. A typical NHS trust has 10’s of thousands of users / endpoints. For instance, we regularly run phishing campaigns for NHS trusts and it’s not unusual to be given 20,000 email targets in a single campaign. These silver bullet anti-malware execution solutions are expensive and licensed per seat so the cost of deploying it into an NHS trust can be more than the available annual budget for that trust to maintain what they have! It’s a simple economics equation. My challenge to those vendors that all have “the solution to malware” do the right thing and donate it to the NHS, after all you will probably need them one day and it would be ironic that if on the day you did, the systems were offline with a ransomware attack. In fact, 4c is the main underlying problem. I have seen trusts with entire Cisco infrastructures that are 100% TrustSEC complaint end to end, and all they would need to enable some of the most advanced packet level manipulation in existence is a simple license. But that cost of that license is so prohibitive, they just can’t switch it on? How crazy is that? Come on Cisco, your big and bad enough to let that one go! Next up I want to tackle the N3. The N3 is the backbone that connects every trust to every other trust and provides carrier internet connectivity as well. It also provides the secure email for the NHS and many other core network services. There is a common conception within the trusts that the “N3 protects us from bad things” and to a certain extent it does. But the flip side of that statement is that it has nearly 1bn endpoints on it! That’s a small internet!!! I mean seriously, 1bn endpoints that all trust each other? Are you crazy? with that sort of scale trust is not possible. The irony is most trusts actually have their own firewalls, but they trust the N3 and each other so they are essentially fire-windows. This is why WannaCrypt and Conficker before it tore through the N3 taking trust after trust out along the way. Even trusts that are more restrictive than others and trust no one, still have to trust common shared infrastructure that allows infections to easily jump from trust to trust. I actually spoke

Jay Abbott Executive Director Falanx Group Don’t attack the NHS! May 16, 2017 • More than anything over the last few days I have seen some of the so called industry professionals I have to consider my peers, wax lyrical about how the NHS should have done better. I want to take a minute to explore that statement and offer my own experience and opinion. For the record, if parts of this article offend you, tough. Over the last 10 years I have had the pleasure of working with a large number of different NHS trusts in the context of a supplier and partner. During this time, I have made a number of observations that make me proud and sad in equal measure. Firstly, during my entire time, I have not met a single IT or Security Professional in the NHS that does not put patient care or clinical excellence first. They truly understand the impact of a bad decision far more than the average equivalent in the private sector. This is a good thing, but can lead to a higher than normal level of risk aversion. This risk aversion however, has led to some of the most advanced, and amazing network architectures I have ever seen. I have personally worked in network architecture for many years and worked on some very interesting networks with very specific needs so I know what “good” looks like. I actually remember walking into my first NHS trust to do an independent security architecture review and genuinely being blown away by the equipment they had deployed, the overall architecture and way it was managed. Unlike some people have been saying, your typical trust has better connectivity than your average enterprise. Now, I am not saying every trust is like this as they are all run independently and some invest more than others, but in my personal experience it’s the norm to be on the latest and greatest kit. Where the infrastructure tends to fall down is on the endpoints. Why? Simple. Because when you spend a million pounds on an MRI scanner and it comes with a windows XP machine, then XP stops being supported and the equipment manufacturer wants an astronomical amount of money for an upgrade, what do you do? Who is really at fault? The NHS or the huge multi-global equipment manufacturer? So, a good trust does what it does and proceeds to put in numerous countermeasures to isolate and ring-fence that machine as best it can while still allowing patient care and clinical excellence to be its priority. So let’s look at those countermeasure options: Patch it – Nope, can’t, doesn’t exit Isolate it in a dedicated LAN – Sure, but I have 30 doctors in 6 clinical departments on 14 campuses that need to access its data and none of them understand technology enough to deal with any form of air gap, so yeah, if by isolate you mean limit, I’m all in! Firewall it, see 2. Prevent malware execution – (a) The manufacture said if we install anything on the box it will crash. (b) we tr

Falanx & the Cyber attacks & the £100 million political scandal By Tom Winnifrith | Monday 15 May 2017 We own Falanx (FLX) shares and are currently well over 100% up on our investment with stock at 9.5p mid. HotStockRockets readers are now 100% ahead on the share tip too. So with the stock surging on the basis of the massive cyber attack that started on the NHS on Friday what to do? First realise that this is a political scandal. I've swapped emails with the company over the weekend and spoken to it today. It is desperate not to be seen to be profiting from what is a ghastly crime so will not be going on a media blitz. But it is clearly very well placed. I refer you to the last statement on trading: Continuing Sales growth is being driven by the newly formed Sales and Consultancy team. In addition, access to over 2000 potential new Cyber Security and Intelligence clients is provided by highly regarded channel partners, including; -- CDW Corporation: The $9bn NASDAQ technology solutions provider, who recently bought Kelway, one of the UK's leading IT suppliers; -- NASSTAR Plc : The AIM listed, managed IT services provider; -- Sentronex: One of the UK's leading Financial Services IT solutions providers; -- Mersey Internal Audit Agency and Audit Yorkshire: providing access to over 100 NHS Trusts in the UK. Ends. So right now Falanx derives very little revenue from the NHS. But it is fair to say that it is very well positioned now that even the NHS realises how vulnerable it is and that action needs to be taken. All MPs seem to be saying that the NHS must spend more on cyber security and it is hard to see how Falanx will fail to benefit in a very material way. But MPs in the party led by the IRA supporting communist Corbyn, saying that the wicked Tories must give the NHS more dosh to spend on cyber security are missing the real scandal here. In 2016 the 15 NHS Trusts that were deemed most vulnerable to cyber attacks were given £100 million to tackle this threat. They have the cash and guess what? Not a cent has been spent. They have just sat on it. This is nothing to do with politicians goofing it is to do with sheer management incompetence within the NHS. In the private sector the managers responsible for this would be picking up black bags this morning. But this is the NHS and so whether it is failing to spend cash allocated for tackling cyber security or stopping Dr Shipman from killing his patients, no grossly overpaid managers ever take responsibility for failure. That is the real scandal. You can bet that those Trusts and all others across the UK are today reviewing their options and will be taking action. Of course there are many players and Falanx is just one of them but it has an in house solution which it can deploy rapidly. So will it get a lift from this? You bet. The point is that even before the cyber attack Falanx was on track to be profitable and cash generative this year ( to Ma

iMinoan – still waiting for notice of legal clearance, short-term trading opportunity or avoid? By Nigel Somerville | Monday 15 May 2017 Disclosure: I own shares in one or more of the stocks mentioned. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from *************). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article. AIM-listed wannabe holiday resort developer Minoan (MIN) has tested the patience of even the most saintly of saints for years and years. It has a plan to build a resort in northern Crete which has been going through Greek permitting and legal processes which make our own UK planning environment look as nimble as an Olympic gymnast. Of course, the misery has been about to come to an end for years, but perhaps now the green light really is imminent. Is it worth a punt? Almost everything is in place for Minoan to start the process of cashing in on the project, with the Presidential Decree in the bag. But a fly in the ointment soon emerged after that seemingly final and critical bit of paperwork was received last year – an appeal to the Greek Supreme Court. At the end of March it emerged in the Greek press that the appeal had been thrown out, but the company needs formal notice of this – and rather than a simple bit of paper signed by the judge arriving in the post, we are all waiting for a formal Gazette-style notice. It still hasn’t come. This may be no great surprise after the “fast-track” application process took rather more than the few months promised – and all the other delays. But chatting to the company on 1 April at UKI it became clear that this wait was fully expected, with notice anticipated to take anything up to two months from then. So maybe, just maybe, we are in for a pleasant surprise in the next fortnight. You can read the excellent analysis offered by the HotStockRockets team HERE which suggested a price target of at least 16p on confirmation that the appeal had been thrown out, and rating the shares a buy at up to 11p. With the shares currently trading on a spread of 9.75 – 10.5p a return of 16p plus on a two week view looks very attractive indeed. But that, of course, is only the reward part of the investor’s consideration: what about the risk? Will the confirmation actually come any time soon, or will we be left waiting for yet more weeks/months/years ahead? On past form it is hard to be sure – which is why the shares are not already 16p. But if the press reports back in March were true (and we have no reason to doubt it) then this is very much a case of a when and not an if. The issue is how long the “when” will take. How long is a piece of string?! My company chat at UKI did make one thing clear: this is the last legal challenge so the all-clear there is the last hurdle. I’m sure there will be o

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