Given the increasing political turmoil in the world, it might not come as a surprise that the risk of cyberattacks and ransomware threats are at an all-time high. The National Cyber Security Centre’s 2021 annual review revealed that there were three times as many ransomware attacks in the first quarter of 2021 than in the whole of 2019.
With the majority of businesses working online, with many now operating remotely, organisations are having to rapidly diversify the way they work and digitalise their processes accordingly – leaving them more vulnerable to attacks.
According to a survey carried out by PwC of 3,600 business and technology executives from around the world, we are expecting 61% of UK organisations see an increase in ransomware incidents this year.
Many of these could be prevented with the correct measures in place and employees undergoing cybersecurity training and following specific policies and processes (see our article on how to protect your remote workers).
Unfortunately ‘The Great Resignation’ has seen the rise of insider threats. Disgruntled employees are stealing information or employees unintentionally taking information with them to their next job, as well as cyber-criminals approaching employees, offering large sums of money to aid their attack from the inside. These threats, alongside external attacks, do not bode well for businesses across the world.
These incidents are widespread and unfortunately, not going anywhere. They have the potential to disrupt your business, or worse case, destroy it. To have a crisis response in place to detect attacks is imperative for the future of your business. Alongside these frameworks, many are making the decision to take out cyber insurance. Whilst extremely costly, these policies will cover you for a variety of attacks and losses to your business – but be sure to read the wording carefully, many standard policies have tightened their definition of a ‘cyber-attack’ and reduced the circumstances under which they pay-out, so a more extensive policy may be better suited to your business. We’d be very happy to discuss this with you.
If you have rolled out new business processes without fully exploring the security implications or feel you don’t have a full understanding of the risks (don’t worry, not many people do!), then get in touch to receive a free health check on your business. We are fully qualified to carry out formal assessments of your organisation’s security needs. By doing so, we can ensure that your cybersecurity spend is achieving value for money. We can then go on to implement the specific measures to create preventative measures and increase your organisation’s ability to respond to such an attack.
If you’d like a quick chat, get in touch and we can look into how we can cyber-secure your business.