Is Cyber Essentials all about security, or are there commercial benefits too? The truth is, they’re one and the same. By working your way through the Cyber Essentials Checklist, you make sure that the fundamentals of your cyber security are solid, which is as commercial as any of your business initiatives.
After the question, ‘Do we have the cyber security we need?’, often comes the next question, ‘How do we know?’
Cyber security best practice applies to every business and every sector. However, industries have their own vulnerabilities, and your cyber security strategy cannot be one-size-fits-all. Some sectors are softer targets, some are more lucrative, and some have specific weaknesses that attract or invite cyber threats.
Unfortunately, cyber security isn’t something you can just ‘set and forget’. Some businesses buy a suite of cyber security services and products and assume they’re protected indefinitely, but that’s not a comprehensive or realistic strategy.
Running a business, you are faced with frequent questions about your IT — things like: ‘What do we need our IT systems to do?’, ‘What software do we need?’ and ‘Is our cyber security strong enough?’
Why does airport security sometimes make us take off our shoes? Because someone once smuggled explosives in their shoes. Why did airlines ban us from bringing liquids onto flights? Because someone disguised bomb-making materials as a bottle of fizzy drink.
Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is an outsourced cyber security service that monitors your systems for breaches and attacks, flags them when it finds them, and neutralises the threat. Is it worth it for your business, and if so, how will it help specifically?
You’re spoiled for choice with security solutions, and while that makes it more likely that one of them is right for you, it also means you have to spend longer assessing the candidates. To help you narrow down the search and find the right partner quicker, here are the five big questions that you need to ask.
Organisations strengthen their security to stop criminals getting in, but often don’t think enough about who they let in. When we think of malware, we usually think about programmes that infiltrate IT systems for the purpose of cyber crime. However, the human brain is often far easier to fool than security software. Humans have conventions, social status, assumptions, and conditioning that IT doesn’t have. Relatively simple tricks can catch out just about anyone, which means people are often the most vulnerable element in a security system. That’s why social engineering is malware for the mind.
Ransomware uses software to encrypt data, hold it hostage, and extort a payment from the owner. Nobody is ever keen to talk about their ransomware attacks. It’s easy to feel embarrassed about falling prey to them, and it can feel even worse if you pay to get your data back and the criminals ‘win’.