Cyber attacks on businesses increase

The latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) reports show incidents involving computer misuse and malware against businesses have increased.

Therefore, with the GDPR legislation now starting to gather momentum it is critical that all businesses comply with the law and protect themselves from the potential of a ‘double whammy’ when it comes to cyber-crime, fines and claims against them.

Steve Walker, managing director of Peritus Learning said, ‘A key change to GDPR legislation is the requirement to report any data breaches to ICO. Therefore, if you have been the victim of cyber-crime in your business this may compromise the personal data you hold, which in turn you must report to ICO. If you are not GDPR compliant, nor have trained your people sufficiently this could result in fines and claims made against you, on top of the cost of cyber-crime incident, which in effect provides the double whammy.’

Currently only 20% of all UK businesses provide the necessary cyber and data security training, which is astonishing.

For example, the British and Foreign Bible Society, based in Swindon, has been fined £100,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office, after its computer network was compromised as the result of a cyber-attack. The intruders exploited a weakness in the Society’s network to access the personal data of 417,000 of the Society’s supporters. For a subset of these supporters some payment card and bank account details were placed at risk.

The attackers deployed ransomware, and whilst the society’s data was not permanently damaged or rendered inaccessible by the encryption, the attackers were able to transfer some files out of the network.