Cybersecurity Expert

  I ASME  del iv ers Cyber Essentials on behalf of UK  NCSC By Sam Jones | Cyber Tec Security  and Dave Whitelegg What is  Cyber Essentials?  If you are just hearing about the Cyber Essentials scheme, read on as we unpack 10 things you might not know about Cyber Essentials. 1. UK Gov Launched Cyber Essentials in 2014 The UK Government  National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) published its ‘10 Steps to Cyber Security in 2012' , after the UK Government agencies recognised small-medium sized UK businesses require further cybersecurity guidance and support in order to protect the British digital dependant economy.  This led to the development of five critical 'cyber essentials' technical security controls which provides a minimum level of cybersecurity protection. Assurance of the adoption of these five security controls by an organisation provides a good degree of confidence an organisation is protected against the most common cyber threats, th...

Small UK businesses bear the brunt of cyberattacks according to the latest industry reports. SecureTeam have crunched the numbers and put together an InfoGraphic which depicts how cybercrime is impacting UK small business. They have concluded UK small businesses are targeted with 65,000 cyberattacks per day, with one small business hacked every 19 seconds! As expected, email is by far the most commonly used attack vector, and the security posture of small businesses is not sufficiently robust enough to withstand cyberattacks, knowledge which the cybercriminals clearly understand.

The UK  National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC )  CyberEssentials Scheme is to be streamlined from 1 st April 2020, with IASME  named as sole partner. It will become easier for UK businesses to protect themselves from the most common cyber-attacks as the UK government-backed cybersecurity scheme is streamlined. The Cyber Essentials Scheme is supported by the UK government to help businesses guard against the most common cyber threats. Over 30,000 UK businesses have gained Cyber Essentials certification since its launch in 2014 and this number is growing year on year. Naming IASME as the sole Cyber Essentials partner will streamline and grow the Scheme and ensure it keeps pace with the changing nature of the cybersecurity threat. Cyber Essentials Scheme launched in 2014 Since its launch in 2014 the Cyber Essentials Scheme has helped to protect over 30,000 UK businesses from the most common cyber-threats. NCSC and IASME are co...

Cybercrimes cost UK small companies an average of £894 in the year ending February of 2018. Small businesses are an easy target for cybercrooks, so its little surprise that around about 43% of cybercrime is committed against small businesses. According to research conducted by EveryCloud , there is much more at stake than a £900 annual loss, with six out of ten small businesses closing within six months of a data breach. Damage to a small company’s reputation can be difficult to repair and recover from following a data breach. Since the GDPR data privacy law came in force in May 2018, companies face significant financial sanctions from regulators if found negligent in safeguarding personal information. Add in the potential for civil suits the potential costs start mounting up fast, which could even turn into a business killer.  Case in point is political consulting and data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which went under in May 2018 after being implicated with data privacy is...

A massive data breach at Equifax dominated the UK media finance headlines this month, after 143 million customer records were compromised by a cyber-attack, 400,000 of which were UK customer accounts. Hackers took advantage of Equifax’s negligence in not applying security updates to servers. The data breach has already cost the CEO, CIO and CISO their jobs. In the UK Equifax faces investigations and the prospect of significant fines by both the Financial Conduct Authority and the Information Commissioner's Office over the loss of UK customer financial and personal data respectively. Hackers stole a quarter of a million Deloitte client emails , follow the breach Deloitte was criticised by security professional for not adopting two-factor authentication to protect the email data which they hosted in Microsoft’s Azure cloud service. September was an extremely busy month for security updates, with major patches releases by Microsoft , Adobe , Apache , Cisco and Apple to fix a...