Joseph Riley, Author at H2 Cyber Security for SMEs

What are the questions business owners ask when considering cyber security?

I wrote a post recently about what SMEs care about regarding Cyber Security v the continued FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt), which many sales pitches tend to rely on, which helps foster the view that it’s all a little hyped up and not as serious as it advertised. Well, I hope my post did a little to dispel this and show that there really is an issue out there that needs to be addressed by all businesses, not just the corporate big boys. Let’s leave the stats and hype behind and concentrate on what SMEs need to be thinking about.

What is the cost of ignoring cyber security?

Perhaps this is the first question that they should be asking. The financial hit of a data breach can be crippling, especially for the smaller businesses who are perhaps running on tight margins and for whom cash flow is often critical. The average clean up for a smallish business is about £27K. this relates to system restoration, hardware replacement, and the implementation of enhanced security measures. and doesn’t include financial loss from the actual data stolen, or whatever scam was perpetrated, and any fall out from compliance failures, such as fines from the ICO. And at least a third of organisations admit to losing customers post a data breach, highlighting reputational damage and a loss of customer trust.

If you take all that into account, you should be able to work out what the potential cost might be for you.

So, what questions should owners, managers and board members be asking?

I think many get bogged down in the technicalities of IT and don’t consider it in business terms. They don’t think about the business impact of cyber security, about what it is they’re trying to protect. It’s not your IT systems, it’s your data that is the crown jewels. IT systems can be replaced, that’s what your insurance is about, but once the data is stolen, then you are in very real trouble.

Risk Management

Talking of insurance, that’s perhaps how you should be viewing Cyber Security solutions. Don’t think tech, think protecting the business. First and foremost, the board members need to ask themselves if they have a good handle on their cyber risk. Have they identified their cyber assets? What is a cyber asset? Cyber assets are not just hardware and software, in fact those are the least of your worries. It’s the data, where it is and how it’s protected that is important. Have you assessed the risk to those assets? Have you assessed the training requirements for your staff, not just the techies but all staff? Think People, Process and then Technology.

Once you have done this, then you can consider what controls need to be put in place to reduce the risk to an acceptable level.

Below is some of the controls you will need to consider. This list is not exhaustive

1. User Access Control (Admin access is a whole other discussion)

This isn’t just about passwords. Yes, they remain important but on their own, they are no longer sufficient. Nonetheless weak passwords, password re-use and password sharing remain one of the leading root causes of a data breach. 123456 and, believe it or not, password, remain the most used passwords across the world!

It is imperative that you have a strong password policy, dictating not just the length of the password, but also its construction, ensuring that there is a good mix of upper and lower case characters, numbers and symbols, that together make things very difficult for password crackers.

On their own though passwords remain a potential weak spot. Multi factor authentication (MFA), sometimes referred to as 2FA, provides that extra layer of defence and can help to protect against brute-force attacks, phishing scams, key-logging and social engineering. MFA can be simply implemented on most email platforms and within various apps you are using. For those of you trying for Cyber Essentials or ISO 27K series, MFA is mandatory, so make sure it’s put in place.

2. Are you backing up your files?

This seems an obvious thing to do but you’d be surprised how often when trying to restore from a backup, it fails. This is often because the backup routine was set up back in the mists of time and has never been reviewed and even more dangerous, it’s never been tested to see if it works. Set up your backup regime, have it reviewed regularly and tested regularly to make sure it works. If you are backing up online, keep in mind that if a cyber-criminal gets access to your systems to, for example, carry out a ransomware attack, then they can probably get at your back up as well. So, belt and braces, consider having an offline backup as well as an online backup. The latter is more convenient but is vulnerable.

3. Do you train your staff in cyber awareness?

My favourite subject – cyber awareness training. Your first line of defence is your staff, but if not trained adequately, they can be your biggest weakness. It’s known in the trade as the insider threat, but it is caused mainly by human error, staff members doing something they shouldn’t, not maliciously but simply because they didn’t know they shouldn’t. It accounts for 88% of data breaches. Providing your people with training on the threats, current scams and basic cyber awareness reduces the chance of a cyber-attack. This really is the easiest and cheapest quick win any organisation can take in reducing their risk exposure.

4. Do your employees regularly travel or work remotely?

This brings us neatly to what Microsoft coined as the New Normal. Essentially this means remote working shared with in office working, known as the hybrid working model, or for some, moving to a totally remote working system. Totally remote is not as common as hybrid working but is becoming more normal with certain size businesses in certain commercial verticals. It’ll never work for everyone, but for those who have embraced it, it saves a considerable amount of expense. It does however require us to rethink our cyber strategy.

Work-from-home employees are at much greater risk than those in offices. Since home connections are less secure, cybercriminals have an easier entry into the company network. Furthermore, the explosion of various online tools, solutions, and services for collaboration and productivity tend to have the bare minimum of security default setting, and updates from third-party vendors can change security preferences and be easily overlooked.

Phishing becomes an even greater threat to home workers, often because, in an office environment, they have access to colleagues and managers, who they can approach for advice and guidance. This is much harder to replicate with remote workers, especially those who may not be particularly tech savvy and who may not wish to become ‘burdensome’ to their co-workers.

Ransomware also enjoys an advantage in the work-from-home model. If their connection to the company is blocked, it is more difficult for workers to get assistance from the right experts and authorities. And since trust levels are lower when working from home, some workers will be concerned that they have “done something wrong” and so may be more reluctant to seek help. While this risk can be addressed by increased training, as well as messaging that vigilance and involving IT support will be rewarded, it can still be an uphill battle.

We need to break out of the old ‘bastion’ security model of a network protected by firewalls and other technologies and think about solutions that are designed to protect your assets regardless of where your employees work from. They exist and aren’t hard to find.

5. Where is all your data stored and who has access to it?

Data tends to proliferate, especially when working remotely. Cyber awareness training helps here, but it also helps for management to have a handle on data storage. All organisations have this problem, but it becomes more acute for those businesses that hold large amounts of what is known as Personal Identifiable Information or PII. This is information that can identify a living individual and compromise their privacy in some way. Financial advisors, estate agents, solicitors etc, all share this issue. The data protection act, becoming referred to as UK GDPR, is not a suggestion, it is law.

One of the biggest issues we find with organisations of all sizes, is that they think they know where all their data is but get quite a surprise when they discover multiple instances of the same data set. This has become a real issue in that the new normal tempts users when working remotely, with possibly less than robust broadband, to copy data from cloud storage to their PC or laptop to ensure they can keep working on it. Then they upload it again when they’ve finished but forget to delete their copy. That’s just one instance but it is vital to understand where all this data is. What if for instance, you get what is known as a subject access request, where a client or other member of the public wants to know exactly what personal data you have on them, and why. I spoke to a financial advisor not long ago who told me that it took one of their partners off the road for 3 weeks, to discover where all the data was kept on just one person. But under the law, they had no choice but to bite the bullet.

There are several systems on the market which will help with this but what most need now is a system that works regardless of the location of the user and continues providing that cover when the user moves from one location to another. This is just a suggestion, but we’d be delighted to demo it to anyone who is interested. https://hah2.co.uk/gdpr-data-protection/

6. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Business Continuity refers to the proactive strategies and plans put in place to ensure that essential business functions can continue in the event of a disruption or disaster. This could include natural disasters, cyber-attacks, power outages, or any other event that could disrupt normal business operations. Business Continuity planning typically involves identifying critical business processes, implementing redundant systems and processes, and developing communication plans to ensure that the organisation can continue to operate smoothly in the face of adversity.

Disaster Recovery, on the other hand, is focused specifically on restoring IT infrastructure and data after a disaster has occurred. This could involve recovering lost data, restoring systems and networks, and ensuring that IT operations can resume as quickly as possible. Disaster Recovery planning typically involves creating backup systems, implementing data recovery procedures, and testing these plans regularly to ensure they are effective.

Both are critical components of a comprehensive risk management strategy and should be integrated into an organisation’s overall resilience planning efforts.

Just like backups, which are a crucial part of Disaster Recovery, these plans can become very quickly out of date and useless, unless reviewed periodically and tested to see if they work.

7. Vulnerabilities and Threats

A vulnerability is a flaw or weakness in an asset’s design, implementation, or operation and management that could be exploited by a threat. A threat is a potential for a cybercriminal to exploit a vulnerability. A simple way to explain this is that a vulnerability is the inability to resist a hazard or to respond when a disaster has occurred. For instance, people who live on plains are more vulnerable to floods than people who live higher up. The threat is the flood itself.

IT risks and vulnerabilities are the potential threats and weaknesses that can affect the performance, security and reliability of your business function and processes. They can have serious consequences for your business goals, customer satisfaction, and competitive advantage.

Identifying vulnerabilities to your cyber security assets and then identifying the threat to those assets in terms of the vulnerability being exploited, informs your risk and enables you to assign a value to it. Financial value can be assigned to the risk score if you so wish. You then apply controls to bring the risk down to an acceptable level, starting with the Very High risks, and then bringing them down to whatever is acceptable to you. That acceptable level, known as the risk appetite, will vary business to business, risk to risk.

8. Supply Chain Security?

In short, a supply chain attack is a cyber-attack that seeks to damage an organisation by targeting less-secure elements in the supply chain.

An example of such an attack was published by NCSC and points out that many modern businesses outsource their data to third party companies which aggregate, store, process, and broker the information, sometimes on behalf of clients in direct competition with one another.

Such sensitive data is not necessarily just about customers, but could also cover business structure, financial health, strategy, and exposure to risk. In the past, firms dealing with high profile mergers and acquisitions have been targeted. In September 2013, several networks belonging to large data aggregators were reported as having been compromised.

A small botnet was observed exfiltrating information from the internal systems of numerous data stores, through an encrypted channel, to a botnet controller on the public Internet. The highest profile victim was a data aggregator that licenses information on businesses and corporations for use in credit decisions, business-to-business marketing, and supply chain management. While the attackers may have been after consumer and business data, fraud experts suggested that information on consumer and business habits and practices was the most valuable.

The victim was a credit bureau for numerous businesses, providing “knowledge-based authentication” for financial transaction requests. This supply chain compromise enabled attackers to access valuable information stored via a third party and potentially commit large scale fraud.

OK, it was over 10 years ago, but don’t think it won’t happen again.

NCSC also cited what is known as a watering hole attack, which works by identifying a website that’s frequented by users within a targeted organisation, or even an entire sector, such as defence, government, or healthcare. That website is then compromised to enable the distribution of malware.

The attacker identifies weaknesses in the main target’s cyber security, then manipulates the watering hole site to deliver malware that will exploit these weaknesses.

The malware may be delivered and installed without the target realising it (called a ‘drive by’ attack) but given the trust the target is likely to have in the watering hole site, it can also be a file that a user will consciously download without realising what it really contains. Typically, the malware will be a Remote Access Trojan (RAT), enabling the attacker to gain remote access to the target’s system.

If you are in someones supply chain, then you need to make doubly sure that your security protects your customer as well as yourself. And conversely, if you are connected electronically to someone who supplies you, are you sure that you are protected from any vulnerability they may have.

H2 provides affordable and flexible one-off and ongoing data protection and cyber risk protection services.

To learn more about the services we provide please click here https://www.hah2.co.uk/

Please feel free to give us a call or email.

Alternatively, you can book a slot using our Calendly link, https://bit.ly/3yoT0qi

T: 0800 4947478

M: 07702 019060

E: kevin_hawkins@hah2.co.uk

Trust H2 – Making sure your information is secure

All about H2

Introduction

All the information below is contained within the website but we thought it might be useful to summarise it in one post to make it easier for people who want to understand what we are all about.

About myself and H2

I like to start any discussion by saying that I’ve been in the cyber security game almost since before it was a game! I started in Information Security at the MOD at a time when IT and databases were in their infancy and got in on the ground floor. I subsequently went to work for the NHS, HP/HPE, CSC and Symantec, during which time I led many major cyber security projects in the public and private sectors, designing and commissioning the Security Operations Centre for the FCO, carrying out several projects for the MOD, leading the security team for the new online passport application, as well as several high street banks.

In 2013 I was asked to go to the middle east to set up a Cyber Security team covering the UAE, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, growing the team from 3 people to 24.

On return my business partner and I set up H2 to serve the SME community. Sadly, my business partner did not survive the pandemic, and I am now the sole management of the company.

So why SMEs? Surely there’s more money in corporate security?

Well yes there is, but SMEs are at the heart of our ethos. During our time working in the corporate sector, it became clear that there was little to no support given to SMEs, either at the S, or the M end of the scale, and the big security companies and system integrators were content to leave that to their resellers ie those local IT support companies that resold their products.

Here at H2 we understand that the only real difference between an SME and a corporate organisation, in terms of cyber security, is that of scale. We have therefore scaled our services, the products that support them, and our pricing, to fit with an SMEs issues and

pocket. We like to say that we offer a triple A service providing solutions that are Appropriate (to you), Affordable and Accreditable (to standards such as Cyber Essentials).

Take a look at our Blog and social media posts. We try to inform and educate, placing a link between what we know, and what SMEs need to know but are rarely told.

Solutions Provided to SMEs

The first thing that we discovered is that SMEs have a very poor grasp of cyber security issues, although that is changing following the pandemic when many were forced to change their working practices almost overnight and have subsequently embraced a distributed working model. There is no doubt that the propensity for working from home, or other remote locations, since COVID has introduced some very difficult, or at least challenging, security vulnerabilities into SME networks. For instance, prior to the pandemic, when they were 100% office based (except perhaps some mobile salespeople), their local IT provider will have almost certainly set up what we called the bastion security model. Ie, like a castle, a bastion, you had a wall around you, and for belt and braces, you also had a moat. The gateway was robust, had a drawbridge and portcullis, or let’s call it a secure firewall and anti-malware system. Everything was locked up inside and nice and secure (in fact it probably wasn’t but that’s for another day).

Whilst Microsoft didn’t invent the term the ‘new normal’, they were the first, I believe, to apply it to IT, following the enforced change in working practices brought about by the pandemic. Many companies have embraced this new normal and have settled into some form of hybrid working. Of course, this is nothing new, it’s been ‘a thing’ for years now, certainly in corporate organisations. The real change came about in SMEs for whom it really was quite revolutionary. Corporate bodies will have spent a lot of money on a variety of remote access systems to keep their data secure, whilst SMEs not only had to rush unprepared because of the pandemic, but they simply didn’t have the budget to employ more secure connections.

What the pandemic has done is change that, or perhaps arguably, accelerated the change to a more distributed way of working, already underway in corporate organisations but now common amongst SMEs.

Our first challenge then was that of education. Changing the mindset of SMEs, moving them away from being simply technology focused, onto a more business oriented cyber

security focus. Cyber security is a business issue, not a technical issue and that is something that many SMEs fail to grasp. Any true cyber security professional takes a

risk managed approach, identifying the risks posed to their client, and then applying the principles of People, Process and then Technology, in that order. That risk managed

approach is equally applicable to all sizes of organisation in all sectors and has not changed since the advent of the internet.

Taking the services we provide as shown clearly on our website (where pricing is shown), www.hah2.co.uk, the first is that of Board Advisory, where we offer advice and guidance to our clients regarding their security. We often end up providing this advice for free as we are putting forward solutions to solve their issues but there is of course a limit to that. We also offer a Cyber Maturity Assessment (CMA), which is close to a full risk assessment but tries to keep the costs down to an order that an SME can afford. The CMA is fully described on the website, and we won’t reprint that here.

Another service we provide is Penetration Testing and Vulnerability assessment. Pen Testing is a point in time test ie the minute you finish it and have read the report, it’s out of date. It is however useful to do once a year or when you add a new feature to your systems, or take a new system into use. We use a fully qualified CREST team who can, if you wish, also carry out attack simulations.

Vulnerability assessments are carried out continuously via agents deployed on the network. The main difference is that as a Pen Test will find real issues, a vulnerability assessment will find things that you may be vulnerable to, but which haven’t necessarily been exploited and in fact, may not be a real issue once investigated. They are, however, continuous throughout the year and can be more effective.

We talked earlier about People, Process and then Technology. Arguably your first line of defence is your people. They can also be your weakest link. Data leaks often occur inadvertently, due to a lack of awareness rather than malicious intent. We offer cyber awareness training designed to equip your team with the knowledge and skills to safeguard sensitive information.

This training can be delivered in one of 2 ways. The first is classroom based, either on site or over a remote connection such as Zoom or Google Meet. The second is online training provided via another of our solutions which will be described below and allows

staff to pick when they will take some time to undertake the training which is delivered in a modular fashion, taking up very limited time which won’t take staff away from their desks to too long.

Another very important service which we provide online, cloud based, using a SaaS solution, is aimed at Data Protection. Clients with large amounts of sensitive data that they wish to protect, use this solution. It is essentially a data loss prevention system

that is designed and priced for SMEs, using state of the art file level encryption. This system comes with a 30-day free trial so that clients can see it for themselves.

Based on Actifile it is tailored to the unique needs of the modern business which often sees its staff work remotely as well as in the office. It protects the valuable data you hold and reduces your risk, without breaking the bank. It covers:

Insider Threat Detection: Protect your business from internal threats posed by employees
Ransomware Protection: Safeguard your data from ransomware attacks that can cripple your operations
Data Leakage Prevention (DLP): Prevent confidential information from falling into the wrong hands
Data Privacy and Compliance: Ensure you meet GDPR requirements and avoid costly fines
Automated Encryption: Protect sensitive data with encryption that’s easy to manage.

In the dynamic world of cybersecurity, staying ahead of evolving threats requires a comprehensive approach that adapts to the ever-changing landscape. At H2, we recognise that one-size-fits-all solutions often fall short, which is why we’ve developed a flexible and scalable cybersecurity solution powered by Guardz, to address the needs of our clients.

Our approach is grounded in sound risk management principles, ensuring that our solutions are aligned with your specific cybersecurity requirements. Whether you need one or more of our products woven into a solution, we can tailor that solution to meet your exact needs and budget.

This complements the data protection solution whilst remaining capable of standing alone. Especially devised and priced for SMEs, it maintains our commitment to affordability and accessibility which is reflected in our incredibly competitive price of

£12 per seat, which includes no hidden charges, add-ons, or expensive infrastructure costs. The solution comes with a 14-day trial to give you hands-on experience with our solutions and assess their impact on your business.

This solution comes with a fully loaded Cyber Security Awareness training course, and a Phishing simulation capability.

You should note that we have bundled the 2 managed services together and offer them at a price reduced by £3 per seat per month.

Finally, we offer certification in Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus which provide robust defences, endorsed by UK government to guard against common cyber-attacks. They are required certifications to work with public sector entities, and achieving certification signals a commitment to securing client data.

We now offer different pricing options to our clients. For Cyber Essentials we offer:

Our Supported Package whereby we guide you during yourself assessment ensuring that you achieve certification first time, can be purchased at a one-off price which we are happy to quote for or a monthly subscription from £61 per month.

If you are short on time or not too sure what to do, try our Turnkey Package whereby we carry out the assessment for you in total, once again ensuring that you achieve certification first time. This can also be purchased as a one off at a price which we are happy to quote for or there is a subscription price which starts at £120 per month.

We can offer consultancy around ISO 2700X if it is considered desirable or appropriate. We can advise on that.

Author: Joseph Riley