Guarding against cyber attacks

Cyber crime is on the increase and costs the UK econ­o­my bil­lions each year.

Accord­ing to a joint gov­ern­ment and indus­try report, The cost of cyber crime, pub­lished with infor­ma­tion intel­li­gence firm Det­i­ca, more than three-quar­ters of the £27 bil­lion annu­al eco­nom­ic cost of cyber crime is felt by busi­ness­es, totalling around £21 bil­lion a year.

Stew­art James, a part­ner in the intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty and tech­nol­o­gy group at law firm DLA Piper, says: “The risks faced depend on what they do and how they oper­ate, but include unau­tho­rised access or loss of per­son­al data, or oth­er con­fi­den­tial infor­ma­tion. This could lead to breach­es of reg­u­la­to­ry oblig­a­tions or con­tract, or oth­er dis­rup­tive attacks that result in dam­age to oper­a­tional sys­tems and process­es.”

Gavin Lyons, chief exec­u­tive of IT secu­ri­ty ser­vice provider Accu­muli, thinks threats can be traced back to one of three sources: crim­i­nal organ­i­sa­tions which extract data from com­pa­nies for finan­cial gain; inter­nal­ly, from a rogue employ­ee; or human error, where pri­vate data is mis­tak­en­ly leaked.

The adop­tion of devices, such as tablets and smart­phones, in the work­place has also left busi­ness­es more open to attack

“The trick for any com­pa­ny is to under­stand where they are vul­ner­a­ble, what gov­er­nance and com­pli­ance they require, and imple­ment [it],” he says. “There are many secu­ri­ty solu­tions that address dif­fer­ent types of threats, but I think that’s part of the prob­lem. It’s impor­tant they’re being imple­ment­ed cor­rect­ly, and the secu­ri­ty of the busi­ness assessed and report­ed back appro­pri­ate­ly.”

The adop­tion of devices, such as tablets and smart­phones, in the work­place has also left busi­ness­es more open to attack.

“Employ­ees are the weak­est link in the secu­ri­ty chain; they need to be made aware of the threats and giv­en pro­ce­dures for respond­ing to them. There’s a real need to change IT usage cul­tures,” says Mr James.

With so much at stake, many large com­pa­nies have invest­ed in dis­as­ter recov­ery to lim­it any dam­age from an inter­nal or exter­nal threat.

John Dry­den, chief tech­ni­cal offi­cer at IT sup­port com­pa­ny IT Lab, says busi­ness con­ti­nu­ity and dis­as­ter recov­ery have under­gone sig­nif­i­cant changes over the past few years.

“The huge growth in vir­tu­al­i­sa­tion and the advent of the cloud have made them [con­tin­gency plans] much more afford­able,” he says. “In the past, hav­ing a dis­as­ter recov­ery plan often meant repli­cat­ing your IT set-up almost exact­ly, both in terms of hard­ware, but more impor­tant­ly cost.

“Now com­pa­nies can do this on a cloud plat­form at a frac­tion of the cost. Third-par­ty cloud plat­forms can allow a com­pa­ny to vir­tu­al­ly repli­cate its infra­struc­ture, com­plete with all the required lev­els of redun­dan­cy.”

Cyber crime is on the increase and costs the UK economy billions each year.