Our recent Outbound™ Group summit, held this October in London, bought together industry leaders, security professionals, and business executives to discuss cyber security trends, best practices, and innovations. The focus of the summit was centred around equipping businesses with actionable insights into ransomware resilience, understanding essential security frameworks, and fostering organisational resilience against cyber threats. This blog aims to recap some of the summit’s most critical points, to help you implement these best practices in your own business.
Ransomware Threats: The Growing Challenge
The first key point of discussion in the summit was achieving complete cyber confidence, with the goals of this section highlighting current rates of cyber-crime and identifying the cyber essentials to combat against threats. Beginning with ransomware, WatchGuard’s ransomware tracker provides coverage of up-to-date ransomware attacks, by date and location. For example, there are currently over 2000 known victims of ransomware attacks that have been documented using this tracker across the globe. Alongside this, WatchGuard protected their customers over 22 billion times from cyber-attacks and comprehensive security vulnerabilities in 2023. This, amongst others used to present the shocking prevalence of ransomware attacks, established an urgency for businesses to enact upon their cyber security defences, to prevent their businesses from being targeted and successfully attacked.
Another study that was presented in the summit, conducted by Cybereason, found that 80% of victims who paid a ransom have experienced another attack since. But it is not just ransomware attacks that causes disruption to the targeted business, it’s the consequences of the operational downtime that continue to hinder. With the aftermath of ransomware attacks often leading to revenue loss, reputational damage, and in some cases, regulatory fines due to data protection lapses. For example, the summit presentation highlighted how 66% of organisations were affected by ransomware in 2023 alone.
Ransomware attacks can be devastating for businesses, with prolonged downtime potentially lasting for days, and in severe cases, weeks. For businesses, this is detrimental to meeting deadlines and providing the high-quality service that clients expect, ultimately causing significant harm to reputation. With these consequences in mind, the summit aimed to foreground the importance for businesses partnering with trusted IT support providers to ensure their protection against these common and malicious cyber security threats. By implementing strong security practices and recovery strategies, businesses can reduce the risk of successful ransomware attacks and minimise potential downtime.
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Cyber Essentials: Establishing a Strong Security Foundation
Moving onto the next focus of the summit, the Cyber Essential framework is a government-backed certification to keep businesses secure against cybercriminals. The National Cyber Security Centre explains that the certification is to protect all businesses against a range of the most common cyber-attacks. There are two certifications, the Cyber Essentials and the Cyber Essentials Plus; the difference between them being that the Cyber Essentials is a self-assessment, and the Plus carries out a hands-on technical verification. However, both levels of certification ensure that your IT infrastructure is appropriately protected against the most common cyber threats.
The summit covered the basics to achieve the Cyber Essentials certification, as a baseline for the minimum a business should be doing to protect themselves and others. Cyber Essentials provides a clear set of practices to protect against prevailing cyber threats, including:
- Patch Management: Systems should be regularly updated to prevent cybercriminals from exploiting vulnerabilities within outdated software or third-party applications.
- User Access Controls: Keep access to your critical systems and data limited, to prevent an attacker from gaining open access into your critical information.
- Firewall Configurations: Setting up boundary firewalls and internet gateways enforce who can access what information and where your users can go. This creates a barrier between trusted and untrusted networks.
- Secure Configuration: Set up devices, like computers and other company devices, to only provide the necessary services. This ensures that users can only access the information that they really need and reduces the risk of vulnerabilities.
- Malware Protection: Protect your business from malicious software, so it cannot access any files on your system.
The benefits of these cyber security essentials secure your business’s internal systems and demonstrates a commitment of cyber security standards to clients and partners. Achieving Cyber Essentials certification also offers the added benefit of insurance against specific cyber incidents, ensuring businesses have an additional layer of resilience.
Tips for Resilience: Practical Steps for Enhanced Defence
Adding onto the Cyber Essentials frameworks, the summit provided businesses with actionable tips that attendants could take away with them and easily implement to enhance their cyber security defences. Let’s take a look at some of the tips that were presented and how you can put these into action, to support your business’s security procedures:
- Regularly Train Employees: By training employees on the signs to look out for when it comes to cyber-attacks, phishing messages, and how to report incidents, ensures that your business is taking a proactive approach to security. With employees understanding good practices, like using secure passwords, daily operations can run seamlessly, secure in the knowledge that everyone is up to date on common cyber-attacks.
- Backup Critical Data: Backing up data to an off-site location, using the cloud, ensures that the most recent data is accessible in the event of an attack. With the cloud, your critical data and information can be access quickly, promising continuity to your daily operations.
- Implement Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Adding an extra layer of security by using MFA enhances prevention against unauthorised access, so cybercriminals are unable to access any sensitive information even if passwords are compromised.
- Conduct Routine Vulnerability Assessments: Frequent assessments help identify potential weak points within IT infrastructure, enabling organisations to address them proactively before an attack can occur.
- Stay Updated on Threat Intelligence: Monitoring industry reports on the latest threats allows you to stay informed and adapt your defences to counter new attack methods.
Summit Success and Key Takeaways
Our summit successfully addressed and presented with clarity cyber security best practices and trends for businesses to safely remain operational. The emphasis on ransomware, Cyber Essentials, and resilience strategies offered participants a well-rounded understanding of current cyber security threats and the steps needed to mitigate them. By applying these insights, businesses can significantly bolster their defences, minimise the risk of cyber-attacks, and ensure continuity even in the face of rising digital threats. If you’d like a deeper insight into the slides presented at our summit you can see them here.
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Secure Your Business Today
Are you prepared to face evolving cyber threats? Contact us today to schedule a cyber security assessment and find out how your business can strengthen its defences. Don’t wait until it’s too late, check out the summit presentation for more detail.
