State of the Nation

The UK Government yesterday published some worrying new statistics about the state of cybercrime affecting British business. The headline – which the BBC reported on the breakfast news – was that “Two thirds of large UK businesses hit by cyber breach or attack in past year.” The Cyber Security Breaches Survey also reported that a quarter of four large firms experienced data breaches – often involving viruses, spyware or malware – on a monthly basis. But that only half of all firms have taken any recommended actions to identify and address vulnerabilities. Scarier still, only a third of all firms had formal written cyber security policies and only a tenth had an incident management plan in place. As these are prerequisites for the PCI DSS, one hopes that those companies who have their act together are those that process card data for their customers. The survey found that almost half of the top FTSE 350 businesses regarded cyber attacks as the biggest threat to their business, up from just 29 per cent in 2014. The Government will be publishing a new national cyber security strategy later in the year, but with cyber attacks and data breaches becoming more prevalent, why wait? We work with companies to help them reduce the risk of expensive and embarrassing data breaches. If the bad guys do manage to hack your organisation and you’re not storing card data then you’ve protected both your customers from potential fraud and your business’s reputation. We also help companies put together standards, policies and procedures to help protect data, and to develop incident and data breach response plan....