⚠️ The cyber challenge for organisations ⚠️
Cyber has featured prominently in the news recently, from high profile incidents affecting major UK retailers like M&S and Co-op, to attacks on global firms and local councils.
Attacks like this are extremely disruptive for businesses and their customers. Dealing with the aftermath puts high pressure on teams across the whole organisation, and requires complex work to keep services running alongside technical recovery work, which can take weeks, months or even years.
The task of communicating what has happened is also highly complex, with lots of unknowns, high exposure, and the need to build confidence and trust. M&S has been recognised for how they have managed this difficult balance, with “genuine humanity at the helm that has genuine concern for their customer's experience.”
Cyber attacks are becoming ever more sophisticated. As threat actors find new ways to operate, including the use of weaponised AI and ransomware as a service, it becomes increasingly challenging for organisations to protect themselves.
It isn’t possible to be 100% ‘cyber safe’. However, there are practical steps that organisations can take to become 'cyber safer': Public Digital has recently helped the Local Government Association to develop a ‘cyber incident grab bag’, designed to support councils through the early stages of responding to a cyber incident. It’s highly relevant to any organisation, and can be a valuable tool for assessing your cyber readiness. We applaud the LGA for making this openly available. And we definitely recommend taking a look. On our blog, Rob offers steps you can take to become cyber safer. He highlights the importance of being ready for cyber threats, no matter how strong your assurances are, developing a collaborative and outcome focused organisation culture, and tackling legacy technology and architecture to make sure you are as resilient as possible.
Building cyber resilience in large organisations (including government) is vital, but is also hard. The UK government faces a severe cyber threat, but, as MPs warned this month, is likely to miss its cyber resiliency targets.
The Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, presented last month, aims to address risks in the supply chain and increase the scope and powers of the ICO, including regulation of managed service providers like the one thought to have been the gateway for the M&S attack. These measures are needed. But as the barriers for threat actors become lower all the time, wholesale modernisation is critical to reducing overall risk. |
