Cyber Security for SME’s in Cheshire

In short there are many reasons why you might be a target.

A hacker might be after your valuable data, for example customer information, credit card information or IP information. It is worth noting that you can quite easily buy ransomware as a service online, the hacker might even be employed by a competitor!

They might want to use your companies infrastructure in order to gain access to a larger business for example. If an email account in your business is compromised as an example and you communicate with a large supplier who know and trust your domain then this is a great way into their system. 

The most obvious one is to make money. Cyber threat actors often target small businesses in more recent times as larger sized organisations are getting more on top of these threats. They will gain less in one hack but there are a huge amount of SME organisations in the UK that are unprepared and possibly rely on an insurance payout to get their data back!

Another reason is to lurk silently on the network collecting data about users connected to the network, gathering their login credentials they use on various websites as an example. They can learn about employees at your organisation, what they do on a daily basis and tailor make more phishing emails to gain more user credentials giving them greater access to your system. 

Working in a manufacturing environment is a good target for cyber attack, especially in todays turbulant times. Not having the right network perimeters in place for example means unknowingly a user who has clicked on a phishing email accidentally could be used as a gateway into industrial machinery which is often network connected now a days to collect data.

Antivirus provides a brilliant layer of security but a business needs much more than this in order for comprehensive protection. They need a multilayered approach. Traditional antivirus in the past has been fine as attacks have been in relative terms quite simple. There were a lot less threats going back and once this did exist were more about causing annoyance than actual business damage. 

Antivirus cannot adequately prevent cyber incidents such as insider breaches, compromised devices and a new generation of malware. 

An insider threat for example is an employee-drive cyberattack and outsiders infiltrating systems via a compromised employee account. Traditional antivirus will do nothing to safe guard against this at all and this is when a much more complex monitoring solution is required.

Antivirus software can’t protect against an already compromised PC, laptop or mobile device. If an employee brings and uses their own laptop inside and outside of work as an example and it is completely unmanaged then this creates a massive risk on the network and for the rest of the devices on it. When they come into work or connect via VPN they are then a part of the main company network. They might not have updates installed or they might have used an illegitimate streaming service on their laptop. Having antivirus only doesn’t stop the user from doing these things and this is why a monitored multilayered approach is needed for a corporate network to be fully secured. 

We are able to send you weekly reports showing that your network is completely safe and secure. We will keep you in the loop of any updates we undertake on a regular basis such as patching software, network hardware and making sure that any any vulnerabilities are sorted out as soon as we hear about them either by applying temporary measures so that an exploit can’t be used whilst an update is created by the vendor or applying a vendors software update as soon as possible. 

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Last year that set of solutions likely gave you very solid security. But today, the majority of cyber attacks are sophisticated enough to bypass basic security precautions. What worked yesterday will not be enough to protect against todays threats. Security needs to improve both proactively and reactively to maintain the same standard you’ve come to expect.

And of course it is much more budget friendly to solve this issue before it happens, especially knowing that the average breach costs a small business £8,460.

A lot of local businesses have the same though. The main issue with this way of thinking is that they usually don’t take into consideration facing angry clients, loosing their reputation or even loosing existing clients after the chaos that happens after a breach. Sometimes businesses also don’t factor in how much they rely on IT until they are no longer able to use it.