On guard against cyber crime

Chamber members come from a wide variety of sectors and possess a huge range of knowledge experience. Here,

Mark Thompson, of Thompson Consultants, shares some valuable tips to avoid becoming the victim of Cyber criminals.

A recent government survey reported something like half of the small and medium size companies who responded had suffered some kind of cyber incident in the last year, so this is not just a worry for big corporations.

My first piece of advice is to take multiple backups of your critical data, ideally keeping it in the cloud so if an attacker gets onto your systems they can’t access your backups. Secondly use 2 or Multi Factor Authentication on internet accounts and applications. Thirdly NEVER re-use passwords – it’s a gift for attackers. Finally, keep your computers and applications up to date.

If you are attacked, in the worst case you will come in to find your data has been encrypted and is unusable and a ransom note has been left. The more common attack, is where a cyber criminal has managed to steal one or more of your passwords and they have sent a load of messages to your clients and suppliers asking for payments for fake invoices. More sinister, is when they wait and monitor your Inbox and then launch a more sophisticated attack to try and misdirect payments to one of their bank accounts.

If you suspect that financial data has been compromised you will need to contact the Information Commissioner, your bank and other finance providers so they can stop any unauthorised payments and monitor your accounts. And you will probably need to tell your employees, suppliers and clients if you think their data has been leaked and is likely to be misused.