If cyber crime is the biggest threat to UK businesses, why don’t we hear about it more often?
It’s a really good question, so here are our main reasons why this is under-reported…
- It’s EXTREMELY embarrassing to admit you’ve been hacked.
We are all human, we do make mistakes. But having to admit you ultimately caused this because you were part of the “it’ll never happen to me” brigade is going to be very embarrassing! Your staff, customers – your husband or wife – are all going to look at you and ask, “why didn’t you do something!?”.
- Many business don’t even know they’ve hacked until it’s revealed by someone else.
On average it takes most businesses over 6 MONTHS to discover they have had a cyber incident. 6 MONTHS. Why so long? Simple: most business do not have any form of Intrusion Detection (IDS) capability within their network. Hackers can stay hidden in their network for a very long time.
- Horrible PR: Do you really want your clients to know their data was accessed?
Revealing that customers data has been stolen is a great test of their loyalty to your business – but is that something you really want to put to the test? Probably not. The fact is around 40% of customers would not return to a business post-data breach. Your competitors will love this! Any competitive advantage you had over them has just vanished…
- The legal ramifications – fines, legal action and fees can be significant, so many cyber incidents are hushed up.
Where do we start on this one! Do you want to be the one to call the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) and report a data breach? The fine for breaching GDPR can be as much as 4% of your global annual turnover, or £20mil, which ever is the greater. Clients could sue you over this too. Gulp.
YOU can avoid these situations…
I’m sure none of the scenarios raised in this article sound like much fun, so what are you going to do to ensure you don’t end up like this?
You must take action. Here’s our ‘getting started’ guide to avoiding a cyber nightmare:
- Get a Cyber Risk Assessment so you can understand the risks to your business, and create a plan to mitigate your risks.
- Decide on a cyber budget – what can you afford to invest in security monthly? (as a heads up – a good starting point should be from £600 per month, based on a business with 30 users).
- Consider Cyber Essentials certification – we can help you with this.
- Engage with a Cyber Security Specialist like us, that can provide a cyber security program to pro-actively prevent cyber incidents causing you embarrassment, bad PR, loss of revenue and horrendous fines.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help your business to get a cyber security program in place, call us on 01738237003.
