Kevin Hawkins, Author at H2 Cyber Security for SMEs

Cyber Threats to SMEs

I’m not a big fan of FUD – Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt – which is often used when selling, or attempting to sell, cyber security solutions. I’ve always considered it a little unethical and unsavoury. However, there is a clear difference between telling people what they need to know and spreading FUD around to scare up sales opportunities. SMEs, just like the corporate world, need, and deserve, to know the truth about what they are facing. I’m also not a fan of the saying ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’, but it’s sadly true. Being uninformed can lead to complacency which can, in turn, lead to some quite disastrous consequences.

It’s being reported that SMEs experienced a 37% surge in cyber security warnings in 2023. That’s a lot, and whilst there is always a little scepticism about stats, if only because many SMEs will simply not involve themselves in gathering such stats, preferring to keep things to themselves regarding their security, you can argue that 37% is a conservative estimate given that reluctance to take part.

They go on to say that Private sector organisations were hit harder by cyber threats, receiving 18% more alerts than their public sector counterparts. As threat levels rose, IT teams also showed signs of shrinking – the mean size of each security team at the beginning of 2024 was 2.63 people, slightly down from 2.7 people in 2021. And that’s for organisations that can afford their own in house IT whilst most rely on contracted IT management companies, often local and themselves resource challenged.

They report that:

Two in five SMEs were taken offline – 41% of SMEs had to take systems and applications offline due to an incident over the last year. For one in seven of those (14%), the outage lasted more than a day.
Data loss hit almost two in five – 39% of SMEs lost data due to a cyber-attack in 2023, a 13% jump since 2021. Nearly a third (30%) of SMEs also lost data due to user error in the last 12 months and 27% lost data due to disgruntled employees.
One in five fell victim to ransomware – 20% SMEs fell victim to a ransomware attack – although the pace of attack has remained consistent over the last three years.

34% paid out after a ransomware attack, with the average pay-out standing at £139,368. And, one in five were subjected to a regulatory fine as a result.

Nearly a quarter experienced an email attack – 23% of SMEs suffered from an employee opening a suspicious or malicious email that led to a serious attack.

Perhaps one of the most concerning issues for SMEs, is that it was reported that those employing some form of cyber security expertise were requiring their staff to work out of hours regularly in order to keep up with the issues, with 38% having been called at night and 34% having their holiday interrupted. Not hugely surprising as cyber criminals don’t keep regular hours. And of course, as I said earlier, most SMEs don’t employ their own in house staff but rely on IT management company’s and it would perhaps pay SMEs to re-visit their Ts & Cs to see if they have any out of hours coverage, and what it entails.

At least 70% of SMEs are struggling with the plethora of security solutions being sold to them, especially as most of these don’t inter operate with each other and instead, work independently and often overlap. It’s essential that any solutions that are in place complement each other and where they do overlap, it’s for a good and useful purpose, providing belt and braces, requiring some form of reporting that allows us to see that these solutions are doing what we think they are doing. All too often that’s not the case.

Getting advice and guidance, ensuring that you ask the right questions to get your knowledge to the point where you can realistically start to assess where you stand in regard to cyber security, is essential. To that end we are holding a webinar on the 8^th of May where we’ll explore some strategies you can adopt to protect your information from cyber threats, providing practical tips and best practices to secure your data effectively, and provide you with a tailored solution specially designed and priced for SMEs. This session is an excellent opportunity to enhance your digital security and protect the data you hold within your network that is critical to the operation of your business and your fiscal security.

You can register via Eventbrite:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/protect-your-digital-assets-before-they-become-digital-liabilities-tickets-880741630927

Cyber Security Benchmarking

As long as I’ve been in this industry, clients have always had a thing about benchmarking, particularly those in the higher echelons, who are naturally driven by maturity, budgets, and the frequency of cyber breaches in their industry. It’s often how they decide their spend. Fair enough. In the SME world it’s perhaps not that formalised but is still a thing. An SME owner wants to know what other people are doing to try and gauge what they should be doing.

I talked, in a post last week, about conformational bias, which is a posh way of talking about the herd mentality and benchmarking falls loosely into that bracket. What we’re actually talking about is the need for reassurance, deflecting plain discomfort, around the proposal to spend money on something that often seems a little esoteric to many.

Of course, not every situation, or every company is the same. Their cyber maturity and risk appetite will often drive different approaches to a similar problem. One company might have a heavy focus on data protection. For example, an accountancy firm, a solicitors, even an estate agency, might assess that a serious data breach involving the Information Commissioner, could, potentially, put them out of business and they would therefore make this a number one risk. On the other hand, a manufacturing company may consider this a risk, but of less importance than say, their designs for their next improvement to their product line.

So how good is a benchmark? Well, it’s a guide, but that’s all it is, and you might think that if you’re close-ish to that guide, and you have an understanding about why you’re not closer, then that is probably OK. What I’m saying is, don’t take an industry benchmark to be gospel, it isn’t, and basing decisions on what is essentially anecdotal evidence, isn’t, in my opinion, a very good basis for making that decision.

This is where building relationships with suppliers is essential for an SME. Trust must be established, especially when dipping your toe in to the murky depths of cyber security. Let’s face it, most people don’t understand it and people don’t trust what they don’t understand. Finding a cyber security company that is happy to work with SMEs is not easy, especially one that isn’t wedded to technology as being the only answer to a problem. Process and procedure can be just as effective as technology in certain circumstances and of course, is much much cheaper. And let’s not forget cyber awareness training, still the cheapest quick win any SME can take to offset the risk of a data breach or scam.

All this is easy to say, but just how do you find a cyber security company you can trust? I vaguely remember hearing the saying that you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince. But in this case, you can’t afford to do that. Time is not on your side but in doing your due diligence, you still need to be cautious.

What are you looking for? I would suggest:

Proven track record. Look into the past of the ownership of the company, not just the employees.

Their approach. Do they lead with technology? If they do, walk away. Do they take a risk managed approach? That’s what you’re looking for.
Do they talk in jargon, trying to baffle you with science? If they do, walk away. This subject can be explained without getting into technicalities. You want something that addresses threats to your business, and they should demonstrate they understand that.
Do they talk about the FUD factor. Fear, uncertainty and doubt. What they’re trying to do is to scare you into buying. Giving you the facts is one thing, FUD is completely different.
Have they taken the time to fully understand what your business is about, what it is that drives your revenue, what is important to you and what is not so important?
Do they see you as a long term partner or a quick revenue win? Can be difficult to assess but it is crucial to building the trust I talked about earlier.

Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of criteria, and you’ll almost certainly have things you want to add, and maybe things you will discard. But whatever route you take to build that trust, it is essential to your protection and peace of mind in what is becoming a very dangerous online world.

Is Cyber Security making the grade for Small to Medium Enterprises?

I’ve touched on this subject several times in the past but was encouraged to revisit it after reading a book by Jean-Christophe Gaillard entitled The Cyber Security Spiral of Failure. A provocative title and of course, the subject matter was aimed at the corporate sector. But my view is the difference between the 2 sectors, in terms of solutions is often one of scale, with corporations being more complex and faced with many problems that the SME sector doesn’t. They do however have the same threats and consequences of failure, as each other.

The author argues that for a couple of decades now, many organisations have been trapped in this spiral of failure, driven by endemic business short termism and the box-ticking culture of many executives in regard to compliance. This really does resonate in the SME world with short termism often driven by financial necessity and especially during and since COVID, where survival was paramount, often requiring day to day management. Of course, no SME owner or manager likes that and would love to have a solid and well-funded plan going forward, if only!

Successful transformation takes time and often requires changing the culture of the organisation, and this at a time when many owners are struggling with the emerging business practices of a more distributed work force, following the pandemic. Coming up with any transformative planning around IT naturally comes below that required for the business in general. Bottom line is often that if it isn’t our core business, it can wait. Even though of course, there are very few businesses that can continue to operate efficiently without their IT systems.

Which brings us to compliance. For most SMEs compliance often means data protection, although there are the financial services regulations, and many do have industry standards governing IT and data, that they must comply with. This often means that owners and managers undertake quick wins using box-ticking measures which often come a cropper sooner or later.

The book quotes from the BT Security survey released in January 2022. One aspect which I fully agree with is the emphasis on getting security basics right and the importance of awareness development amongst employees. Getting this right and training our employees are essential pillars of any cyber security practice, so as the book says, the question remains, why are we still banging on about it? – and everyone who reads my stuff knows I do that a lot.

There are a lot of traditional good security practices which have been pushed and re-emphasised time and time again. Patch management, access management, anti-virus/malware, firewalls etc, and from my time working in the corporate space, I know that large enterprises have spent millions on traditional areas of cyber security over the last 2 decades.

But are we really still stuck there, entrenched in traditional thinking when our working practices are changing, technology is changing, compliance requirements are changing?

SME management is often completely left behind by these changes. They have enough problems just keeping their businesses afloat and trying to grow, they don’t have enough time or resource to keep abreast of these many and varied issues. Let’s face it, if corporate management is struggling with this changing landscape given their resources, what hope for the SME.

More than half (54%) of SMEs in the UK had experienced some form of cyber-attack in 2022 (stats for 2023 are starting to trickle through), up from 39% in 2020 (Vodafone Study, 2022). As we travel around and visits clients or potential clients, it is common to find that they have the view that adequate security is provided by technology. They rely on their IT provider to provide the guidance they need which tends to involve firewalls, anti-malware software and perhaps a backup regime. All well and dandy. A quote from Bruce Schneier, Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, goes like this:

‘If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology’.

So, what does he mean? As he’s not here to ask I suggest that he’s saying is that essentially the technology available can be an essential part of your protection but it has to be targeted in the right way, which not only means you have the right piece of kit doing the right thing, but that you are targeting your IT spend to support your business goals and give a maximum return on investment (ROI). It should also be married to good policies and processes that are enforceable and auditable and fully understood by your work force. To do this you have to understand exactly what your risks, vulnerabilities and threats are to ensure that your solution to those risks, vulnerabilities, and threats, is targeted for maximum effect and ROI and that the technology is supporting the policies and processes, all of which is underpinned with good security awareness training.

But now we have the ‘new normal’ with many businesses enjoying the financial bonus of having a smaller office footprint whilst many people work remotely, bringing with it an increase in security problems. Earlier we mentioned traditional security solutions that have been around for a long time, most of which pre-date the pandemic and were based on the old bastion security methodology ie a network perimeter, protected with traditional solutions. But that bastion model no longer exists in many places, or if it does, it only protects half the workforce in the office, whilst the other half work remotely. What is needed is new solutions that protect your staff wherever they might be working from.

Luckily for you, we have such a solution.

A Company’s Tale – From COVID to Hybrid – Part 2

In last weeks blog we talked about a company that was forced, by COVID restrictions, to move to working from home, and how that affected the organisations’ structure and ability to continue in business, and some of the difficulties they faced.

We reached a point where they had started to get back into the office but had decided to adopt the hybrid method of working, saving money on floor space, fuel and light etc. But this has come with problems of its own which we’ll look at now.

Hybrid working is something that many SMEs like because of the cost savings, providing of course that the business doesn’t require people on site, such as manufacturing, transport etc. Company’s such as lawyers, financial advisors/accountants, HR facilitators, recruiters and the like, can support hybrid working quite easily, from an operational standpoint.

Last week we saw that the 2 partners are aware that they hold a growing amount of personal and corporate data, not just about their own staff and systems but also about their clients. They were also aware of the Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR but at a very surface level and were not sure about how much this will affect them. For example, in terms of policies, they have very little that references the DPA 2018 and/or GDPR. Their website does not contain the necessary privacy statement or statements regarding the use of Cookies. They don’t have an overarching security policy or a cyber security strategy in place.

So, what’s are the issues arising from last paragraph? Well, the DPA 2018, or UK GDPR as it’s becoming colloquially known, requires that data is processed and stored securely and that managers and staff are aware of the regulations regarding the safe processing and storage of information, which are quite extensive and can be daunting, but needn’t be an issue for SMEs, if not ignored. The ICO is, in my experience, very helpful in this regard and are not there to hand out heavy fines, threatening to put you out of business. If you can demonstrate that you have done your very best to obey the law, then they will be helpful and conciliatory. On the other hand, if you’ve been neglectful and even a little cavalier about it, then not so much.

But getting back to the case in point, these guys were now at the juncture where they had their staff working from home for about 3 days a week, and coming into the office on 2 days, unless of course they were consultants who were visiting client sites and were working on the move. Everyone now had a company laptop, including admin staff, and data was held on the cloud.

But what didn’t they have, and how would that affect the? Well, firstly they didn’t have a cyber security strategy in place. So, what is a cyber security strategy? It’s a plan that outlines an organisation’s approach to protecting its digitally held assets and information from cyber threats. This strategy typically includes policies, procedures, technologies, and practices that are designed to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from cyber-attacks. People, Process and Technology combined and integrated to provide protection.

This needn’t be scary, and you can pick and choose what is important to your organisation, what needs to be comprehensive, and what can be less so. The level of risk you are prepared to take, is entirely your call. Key components might include:

Risk assessment: Identifying and prioritizing potential threats and vulnerabilities to the organization’s systems and data.
Security controls: Implementing technical and procedural measures to protect against cyber threats, such as firewalls, encryption, access controls, and employee training.
Incident response plan: Establishing protocols for responding to and recovering from security incidents, including communication plans, containment strategies, and forensic analysis.
Continuous monitoring: Monitoring systems and networks for suspicious activity or anomalies that could indicate a security breach.
Compliance management: Ensuring that the organization complies with relevant laws, regulations, and industry standards related to data protection and privacy.

What the management is doing here, is laying down a framework for how things need to be developed. It doesn’t need to happen all at once,

Not having formulated a strategy, the company didn’t have much of this in place, and what it did have wasn’t well structured and integrated. The security products in use were stand alone, working independently of each other. Another major flaw was that they had no cyber awareness training in place, neither did they have effective policies. Those that they had were downloaded from the internet as a box ticking exercise. They were in fact a cyber disaster looking for somewhere to happen.

The 2 partners were aware of these issues and yes, they took some time to get around to addressing them simply because recovering the business from the issues arising from COVID, took precedence. But they realised that this couldn’t be put off for any longer and took action.

They engaged with us to first carry out a Cyber Maturity Assessment. This covered:

Cyber Security Strategy.
Cyber Security and Data Protection policies.
Protective monitoring and vulnerability assessment.
Incident response and business continuity planning.
Access control.
Employee awareness training.
Compliance.
Technical Security

The strategy they needed could be very much simplified to meet their requirements, but it did cover the salient points and gave a clear indication of what was needed immediately, what could follow and what was more of a nice to have rather than a necessity. To that end we were able to structure remediation that was phased over a number of months, covering 2 budgetary periods.

End result, they had a solution that was affordable as well as appropriate to them. It covered staff in the office, working from home and on the move. It kept them compliant with the relevant legislation and set them up to achieve a standard such as Cyber Essentials, which is next on their list. If necessary, they could even go as far as ISO2700x series, although that might not be appropriate for them at their current size.

A Company’s Tale – From COVID to Hybrid

This is a tale that could be told regarding many organisations, especially since COVID hit. Names have been changed and certain other details have been omitted or masked.

Hawk Engineering Ltd is a company that provides high quality environmental engineering services to its clients, and began operations on 16 July 2019, not long before COVID hit. It’s a limited company owned and operated by Norman Jones and Rupert Smith. Mr. Jones and Mr. Smith both left their respective jobs to specialise in environmental engineering consulting to small and medium sized businesses.

The company was set up to target small to medium sized companies and government organisations within the UK. They have managed to secure several contracts and have grown from the original 2 man team to 8 consultants/engineers and 3 support staff, housed in a serviced building where they rent 4 rooms, one for the admin staff, one for the consultants, another for the 2 partners and a small conference room. The support staff cover finance, HR and general admin duties. The building shares a reception area and a cleaning contract. The cleaners operate out of hours, cleaning after everyone has left for the evening. The consultants are provided with laptops, tablets and smart phones whilst the admin staff use desk top PCs, and all are connected to a large printer.

Rather than ramp up its permanent staff too quickly, they use relevant qualified consultants when necessary. These consultants are given an email address and access to the data they need to work on projects.

The 2 partners are aware that they now hold a growing amount of personal and corporate data, not just about their own staff and systems but also about their clients. They are aware of the Data Protection Act 2018 and GDPR but are not sure about how much this will affect them. They have a local IT management company under contract and up to the start of COVID had an onsite server which stored their data and an email server providing mailboxes to the staff and contractors. At the outbreak of COVID, this caused an issue.

In terms of policies, they have very little that references the DPA 2018 and/or GDPR. Their website does not contain the necessary privacy statement or statements regarding the use of Cookies. They don’t have an overarching security policy or a cyber security strategy in place.

But everything in the garden was rosy, the company was doing well, it was in profit and had a relatively full order book, at least for the foreseeable future. And then along came COVID and everything changed.

At first it wasn’t a problem, we all remember how the UK ramped up relatively slowly, with lockdowns coming after those in other countries, but come along they did. The full implications of not being able to work in the office only started to become apparent after the office was out of bounds. They couldn’t claim any sort of immunity because they were simply not in an industry that required such immunity, so the office closed. The consultants used laptops and they could continue to work, but not securely. They didn’t have a remote access system in place as consultants worked on client site and tended to use client networks through which they could connect. Not optimum but cheap and cheerful and cash flow was everything to a small business. The real hit was on the admin staff as they used desktop PCs which they had left behind when they went home.

So initially the admin staff were the priority to find a solution for and the first issue was to be able to find machines they could use at home, and then connect them to the office file and mail servers, the latter applied to consultants as well.

I’m sure most reading this will remember the issues as many of you will have faced the same problems. So long story short, the problem was to establish as near to normal operations as possible and they ignored security as firstly, they didn’t grasp the implications, and secondly, they didn’t know what to do about it. Their IT management company wasn’t a lot of help in the latter regard simply because they were firefighting issues for all or most of their clients and didn’t have the time or resource, and frankly, didn’t really have the skill set either.

In many respects recovering an operational capability in that instance, wasn’t much different in recovering from any natural disaster and much of the planning required for a disaster recovery and business continuity situation, would have applied, with perhaps the difference that the office would continue to be out of bounds. So, plans could be adapted, assuming of course you had a plan in the first place, and they didn’t.

What they were able to do was to set up a contract with a cloud provider and as their IT support got some bandwidth, they migrated their data from the office based server to the cloud storage and at the same time migrated their email. Getting staff to connect to the cloud was an issue and some found it easier than others as that had to be done remotely and some were more IT savvy than others.

It didn’t solve the desktop PC problem though and staff continued to use home PCs, the same PCs their kids were gaming on, to connect to the company data. A recipe for disaster. Of course, this was solved by purchasing and shipping laptops which the IT support set up before shipping. But by then their data could easily have been compromised via the home PCs. There is no way of knowing whether or not they were compromised and if this is a problem which could come back to bite them.

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.

The company has now evolved further, and expanded a little, and has adopted the hybrid method of working, saving money on floor space, fuel and light etc. But this has come with problems of its own which we’ll look at next week.

Data Breaches – How bad could it be?

“Fujitsu Hacked – Attackers Stolen Personal Information”

Fujitsu confirmed a cyberattack that led hackers to steal personal data and customer information.

Now there’s a headline to put fear into their customers, both current and potential. Not a great look for one of our premier IT system integrators and manufacturers.

But what’s that got to do with me you say? I don’t have any Fujitsu kit and I’m way too small to feature on the radar of a hacker or team of hackers, that would target someone like this. OK, maybe true, maybe not so true.

Did you know that since 2005 the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) has ruled on 13,500 freedom of information and environmental information cases. Many of these would be classed as SMEs and small government departments, particularly local government. Last year alone, 86 enforcement actions were taken which included 37 reprimands, 24 enforcement notices, 23 monetary penalties and 2 prosecutions. Fines of around 80K are not uncommon, and a fine of that size would be a severe blow to an SME. The ICO has issued fines totalling £590,000 to five companies for collectively making 1.9 million unwanted marketing calls which targeted the elderly and people with vulnerabilities.

Fines and enforcement notices cannot be hidden, they are published on the ICO website for all to see, which can have an impact on the reputations of companies, adding to the pain of any fine caused by a unwanted marketing calls or data breaches.

In practice though, the ICO is not there to put you out of business and the chances of a fine of anywhere near the maximum, being applied to an SME, is low but not impossible.

It is, for most SMEs, about doing what is reasonable to prevent a data breach. That will include having the right policies and procedures, known to all staff, and rolled out. Don’t play lip service to this, you will be found out. It is important to be aware of the threat and take the necessary actions to prevent breaches.

Lack of adequate data security is an important basis for imposing fines. Are you one of the SMEs who has swallowed the line that a firewall and some anti-virus, plus cloud storage, is all you need?

In addition to inadequate security, one of the frequent reasons for imposing a penalty is failure to report a violation despite the obligation under the law. Have you got that covered with an adequate policy and process in place and understood?

This can all be a real nightmare for many SMEs, particularly those with a large amount of personal data, much of which they can’t ditch. For example, financial data which under other legislation, they must keep for 7 years. I’m thinking about Estate Agents and financial advisors, even solicitors who I find are very good at telling others what they need to do to comply with the Act but aren’t so hot on how to do it.

One of the biggest issues I find with SMEs, is that they often 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 since COVID, in that remote working is becoming normal and it’s a real temptation for an employee, working from home 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 recently 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.

We’ve been pondering these problems for some time, and they boil down to processing and storing the data securely and being able to quickly lay your hands on it. There are several systems on the market which will capture where your data is, and who has access to it, generally under the banner of Data Loss Prevention, or DLP. These systems are based on an event-driven approach and require extensive ongoing rules management built for LAN/WAN perimeters and are becoming much less effective working in an increasingly perimeter less environment.

Local and Wide area networks and the notion of a security perimeter are no longer valid with the transition to hybrid cloud, work-from-home, and zero-trust architecture. In such a setup, sensitive files are spread across on-premises repositories (File Server, NAS) and different cloud-based repositories. These cloud-based repositories are divided between the ones that you manage (managed cloud, such as organisational OneDrive), shadow IT (such as communication apps like slack or WhatsApp), and 3rd party portals. We needed an answer to this new data landscape with a cross-platform discovery functionality, coupled with the data flow monitoring capabilities.

We came across Actifile, which works very differently to a standard DLP, which in any case, often requires other tools to provide the security functionality needed. Actifile is based on analysing data risks and applying pre-emptive encryption that handles both external threats and insider carelessness, all in the world of no security perimeters. Moreover, Actifile’s set and forget method, requires little to no maintenance, and can be up and running securing data, in less than 3 working days providing a detailed breakdown of the data risk and leverages the data risk for data flow monitoring, auditing and remediation. This approach greatly simplifies the process.

Actifile is a cloud-based management platform coupled with a lean agent for workstations (both Windows and Mac), File Servers, NAS and Terminal Servers, and a sidecar docker instance for cloud-based file shares (. i.e., OneDrive).

Step 1: Data Risk Discovery and Quantification

Based on predefined privacy regulations and PII definitions, Actifile immediately starts scans for sensitive data using smart patterns. Actifile then quantifies data risk per PII type in local currencies.

Step 2: Data Risk Monitoring and Auditing

Tracks and audits data risk in real-time by continually monitoring incoming and outgoing sensitive data flows from and to the perimeter-less organization.

Step 3: Data Risk Remediation by Encryption

Our patented transparent encryption process automatically secures sensitive data across all endpoints, cloud apps, 3rd party portals, and shadow IT. The entire process, from initial deployment through data risk analysis to remediation by automatic encryption takes as little as 72 hours.

Finally, and importantly, it is very light on administration, quick to set up and we are offering a 30 day trial at no cost. If you don’t like it, we take it away.

Cyber Security Policies – A Must Have or a Nice to Have

How important are policies and processes in comparison with technology, when it comes to Cyber Security and its sister discipline, data protection. The clue is that in Cyber Security we refer to People, Process and Technology, in that order.

Top of this list is People, and I’ve written extensively about how important cyber awareness training is for all, managers and employees alike. This piece is all about policies and processes. First and foremost, policies have to be relevant to the organisation and not just downloaded from the internet, maybe with a few modifications, before applying a tick in the box and moving on. Policies have to mean something and have a purpose. Many organisations I go to either have some very scant policies or actually, none at all.

I often talk about risk in terms of cyber security and how managing that risk is extremely important. And that means understanding what those risks actually are, and then taking steps to mitigate them. When I talk about this, I can often see the wheels turning and the audience thinking technology and how much is that going to cost them. Well, it’s very often the case that technology is not the answer. There are many risks where a good policy, promulgated to, and understood by all, can save the company money.

A good example of that is a fairly common scam that tends to costs SMEs between 5 and 50K depending upon the size of business. How this is achieved is that the scammer or let’s call him/her what he/she is, the criminal, spends some time profiling the company, using various social engineering techniques to work out how the company is organised and who is who. You may be surprised as to how much of that information is freely available on the company website, companies house and other sources. Having discovered who the boss is, and who looks after invoice payments, the criminal then ‘spoofs’ the bosses email. Email spoofing, in simple terms, is sending an email purporting to come from someone else. So, it arrives purporting to come from the boss, but actually it’s from the scammer. Such an email is sent to the person who pays invoices, with an invoice attached, saying please pay this as a matter of urgency. This happened recently to someone I know, and when it arrived in the accounts department it didn’t look cosher to the payments clerk, who replied to the email asking if the boss was sure. Of course, she got an email back saying yes, I’m sure. She paid it and the company lost over 30K. The accounts clerk was clearly switched on but she made a basic error, because she didn’t know any different. If she had sent a fresh email to the boss querying the invoice, it would have gone to the boss who could have stopped the transaction. Instead, she replied to the email and her reply went back to the scammer. A policy which dictates fresh emails rather than using the reply function, and known to all, would have saved the company a lot of money.

Policies and attendant processes are essential for the protection of company data and the bottom line, company money. What needs to be covered and in what depth, depends on the risks that the company is facing, and will differ company to company depending on its type. In broad terms, and as an absolute minimum, the following are required:

Overarching IT security policy – often this only needs to say very clearly what responsibilities employees have in regard to security and data protection, lay down a requirement and responsibility for cyber awareness training, and state that all employees are to be cognisant of all the policies and are to sign that they have read and understood them. And most importantly, it must be signed off at board level making it clear that this is a crucial requirement.
IT Acceptable Use Policy – what is, and what is not, an acceptable use for company IT.
IT Email Policy
IT password policy
IT Mobile working policy – essential for mobile workers who may be tempted to work from a coffee shop, and of course, working from home. This latter might be a separate policy or can be part of the mobile working policy.
Data Protection Policies – a whole other subject.
Social media policy – this can be really important. Probably 100% of your employees will have a social media presence and will use it daily. How important is it that they don’t associate themselves with the company on their private social media? Depends on the person but it could be damaging in reputational terms. The company might also do some digital marketing on social media. Who is, and who is not, allowed to get involved with that function.

This is not an exhaustive list. It depends very much on risks that needs mitigating. They will also be accompanied by processes to support the policy.

Does this resonate with you. If you’d like to know more, we’d like to help.

Another Tilt at AI

At the risk of boring you about the risks inherent in AI, I’m going to have another go, simply because it’s a fascinating subject. AI can really become the gift that keeps on giving. We’ve always played catch up to the cyber criminals, trying and often failing to anticipate what the next attack will be, what the next series of attacks will be. Will it be ransomware, denial of service or perhaps a new and more sophisticated scam? Who knows? But there is no doubt that AI is raising the bar.

I have talked a lot about the re-emergence of the script kiddie and how AI in enabling this particular breed of wannabe criminals. But it’s also true that the more skilled and sophisticated criminal is making use of AI and finding new and innovative ways of relieving you of your hard earned cash.

There is a lot going around within the IT and cyber industry about the ethical usage of AI, its ethical development, and that IT system integrators have a cast of thousands working on such ethical development and usage. Fine, I applaud them. But what does that mean for cyber security, and indeed data protection? Well, I have to say, in my humble opinion, not a great deal. I say that simple because no matter how ethical we are, the criminal doesn’t give a damn, he or she will continue on their own sweet way and do what criminals have always done, which is to completely disregard ethics. So, whilst we can applaud and support those companies who are producing software and systems which use AI ethically, for the good, but just like old times, the criminals will do their own thing.

So, let’s take a look at some of what is at risk in terms of our data and systems:

Data Protection. AI systems tend to be extremely good at analysing, organising, and harvesting vast amounts of data, raising concerns about privacy breaches and unauthorized access to sensitive information. A good AI powered attack could capture huge amounts of personally identifiable information (PII), in a ridiculously short amount of time.

Data Integrity. In the good old days (please indulge me – I’ve been around a long time), we used to talk about CIA, no, not the infamous US intelligence agency, but Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability. We now have something we call the Adversarial Attack. This is where attackers can manipulate AI algorithms by feeding them misleading data, causing them to make incorrect predictions or classifications, in turn destroying the integrity of your data, not just rendering it useless, but dangerous.

Model Vulnerabilities. This next one is relatively new, at least to me, and as I never tire of saying, I’ve been this game as long as there’s been a game. It’s something call Model Vulnerabilities. AI models can be vulnerable to exploitation, such as through model inversion attacks or model extraction, where attackers can reverse-engineer proprietary models. So, if you’re in the dev game, this is a very real nightmare.

Bias and Fairness. AI systems may inherit biases from training data, leading to unfair or discriminatory outcomes, which can have legal, ethical, and reputational implications. This could be used as another form of extortion, playing with the integrity of your data, to the point where you can no longer trust it.

Malicious Actors. These can compromise AI systems at various stages of development, deployment, or maintenance, posing risks to organisations relying on these systems. This has a play in supply chain security.

Attackers can leverage AI techniques to enhance the effectiveness of cyberattacks, such as automated spear-phishing, credential stuffing, or malware detection evasion.

Addressing these risks requires a multi-faceted approach, including robust security measures, thorough testing, ongoing monitoring, and regular updates to mitigate emerging threats.

The real danger is complacency. AI isn’t a future hypothetical threat but is very real and here now, already making itself felt, for both good and bad.

Scams v Hacks – how does this effect SMEs?

When I speak to SMEs, I make the point that the chances of being ‘hacked’ is relatively low when compared with being scammed. Why? In my view, I look at a hack as being a technical attack on a target by someone who is technically savvy and skilled in identifying and exploiting weaknesses in a company’s defence. A scam on the other hand can be perpetrated by people with relatively low levels of technical ability and scams are in fact, a con, just like any other old fashioned con, in that they get the target to agree to, or to do something, that will benefit the con artist.

We always recommend that our clients try as best as they can to have defence in depth. That’s an old military term which is often used in cyber security now to describe multiple layers of defence. This can be expensive though and it must be tempered by budget, targeting controls where they are most needed. What this does is to deter many attackers who are looking for a quick win, so if they have to work long and hard to break in, they’ll often go elsewhere, where the pickings might be easier. And of course, whilst an SMEs defence might be somewhat less than those of an enterprise organisation, the pickings are likewise smaller, making it not cost effective for the attacker to take too much time with a technical hack.

Does this make scams much more attractive to the criminal? Yes, I believe it does, simply because the amount of effort required is low and they are skilled in manipulating people, especially those that have had minimal cyber awareness training. Scamming, just like hacking is generally preceded by some form of social engineering. Social engineering refers to techniques aimed at talking a target into revealing specific information or performing a specific action for illegitimate reasons. So, whilst a hacker modifies a computer’s software and hardware structure to carry out certain tasks, social engineering uses people as weapons to attack selected targets. In this way the manipulation is accomplished by employing trust through different forms of communication.

Typically, social engineering is achieved via Phishing, Vishing (video), Smishing (via SMS), malware and Spear phishing where the targets are selected for their importance to a specific attack. Whatever method is used the aim remains the same, it is to persuade the unwary to give up sensitive information, install malicious software or do things that compromise your business security. The best protection against social engineering remains a work force that are aware of the techniques and dangers posed by this.

What is the cost of scams to the across the globe? One statistic suggests that public sector fraud losses amount to about £50.2 billion whilst frauds committed directly against individuals, including marketing fraud and identity fraud, is around £8.3 billion. The total cost of fraud has risen from about £190 billion in 2017 to almost £219 billion. (Source Peters, Peters and Crowe). Of course, not all of this is via online fraud, but it is becoming the most common type of scam we see today.

Some of the most common types of scams that we see include, but are not limited to:

Copycat government websites. Some scams involve websites designed to look like official government websites such as HMRC. …
Dating and romance scams. …
Holiday frauds. …
Mandate fraud. …
Pharming. …
Phishing emails.

I received an email only yesterday purporting to come from someone called, and I kid you not, Lisa Monaa, inviting me to partake in an extremely profitable project, and I just couldn’t bring myself to read anymore. It was a badly written phishing email with little chance of success.

AI is having an effect as well. I’ve written earlier about the CEO scam whereby a CEOs email is spoofed and sent to an accounts department with an invoice attach, stating that the CEO has received a complaint from a supplier that their invoice is late and to get it paid without delay. That scam has now been updated to a voice simulated by AI, over the phone, demanding the same.

Whilst that scam is quite old, it shows how social engineering has a play. Firstly, they have to find out what the CEOs email is. Not difficult. The company’s email form will almost certainly be shown on their website with a contact like sales@abc.com. So, the attacker knows that the suffix is abc.com. They may well also be able to get the CEOs name from the website or even Company’s House. Next send an email to JSmith@abc.com. If that bounces send it to John.Smith@abc.com and so on until it goes through. Next phone the accounts department, ask for Mary in accounts payable. No Mary here I’m afraid. Oh sorry, I was sure it was Mary, who handles accounts payable then, Oh that’s Julie. So, he now has CEOs email and someone to send the email to. That would probably take about 30 minutes of the scammers time.

The impacts of scams can be very far reaching. Firstly, there is financial loss, which to many SMEs operating on tight margins, can be quite devastating. Then there is the possibility of data breach. If you are a business with lots of client personal data, say a financial advisor, a lawyer, an estate agent, pharmacist, you get the drift, and the aim was to steal data, then you could be hit with a substantial fine from the Information Commissioner not to mention lawsuits from those whose data has been stolen. Reputational damage can be disastrous and then there is the effect on staff who can suffer greatly thinking they have damaged the company and put everyones job at risk.

Bottom line – scamming is endemic, it’s going nowhere, and AI is going to make it more prevalent, not less. SMEs spend far less on their defences and on cyber awareness training making them more likely to be targeted. Combating this threat should be high on your to do list.

A Tale of Two Company’s

These stories are fictitious but are based on real events with the company names, locations, and industry vertical either changed or obscured.

Company One

ABC Ltd is a chain of financial advisors which has seen strong growth even allowing for the hiccup of the COVID lockdowns. It has grown from one site nearly 20 years ago, to six sites situated in rural market towns in the East of England. As with nearly everyone else, COVID has significantly changed the way they operate as they were forced into home working and never went back to being fully office based and are now operating a more distributed hybrid working pattern, with staff working between offices and home. This hasn’t proven to be an issue and has some financial benefits, reducing the office footprint, fuel and light and travel costs. Their clients, consisting of local businesses mainly but with a significant department looking after individuals, have not been impacted by these changes.

John is the finance director, and he was given the additional responsibility for IT, something not unusual in SMEs, as they can rarely afford their own in house IT experts. This has led to John outsourcing the IT to a local IT management company and so far, they have had no complaints. Although John doesn’t profess to have any in depth IT knowledge, he discussed their requirements in detail and accepted that a move away from onsite servers and storage to a cloud based system made perfect sense and lent itself to the distributed network they now operated.

However, he had some concerns around cyber security. He read a lot and what he read worried him, particularly about things such as ransomware, phishing, social engineering and scamming. He knew that they held considerable amounts of personally identifiable information (PII) as defined by the Data Protection Act or UK GDPR as it is becoming known, and he had heard horror stories of company’s being fined a lot of cash for losing that data. So, John decided to bring to bring this up at a board meeting and was met with some resistance from the CEO and other board members. They asked what advice he was getting from their IT providers, and he said not a lot. They seemed to be happy with the defences in place, which relied on firewalls in the office, and personal firewalls on remote laptops and desktops, anti-virus software and secure channels for sending data to and from the cloud storage. The cloud provider operated under Ts&Cs which seemed to ensure that they took responsibility for the secure storage of their data. He was concerned that not all their data was stored on the cloud, even though it was supposed to be. He knew that staff working from home downloaded data onto their laptops, worked on it, and then uploaded it. He was sure they ever deleted the copy they had on their laptops and had no way of checking. He was also sure that data was attached to emails and sent around, so there would be copies on the email server, and on email clients. But he was told to forget about it as it wasn’t a priority for funding.

Jumping forward a couple of months and staff were panicking, and his phone was ringing off the hook as IT user after user was seeing a red text box sporting a skull and crossbones and the message that their data was encrypted, and if they wanted to unencrypt it, it would cost £50,000. The CEO convened an emergency board meeting, and the IT provider was dragged in. It didn’t take long to ascertain that this was a sophisticated attack and when they attempted to access their cloud storage, they found that the data held there, was also affected.

The CEO asked the IT provider how long this would take to fix, if indeed it was fixable. He replied that they did have two sources of backups of the data, online and offline. The problem was that the online data could also be affected and so the safest recourse was the offline backup, but that was only done weekly and therefore they would lose at least 3 days’ worth of data. The CEO was not pleased. Added to this, John wasn’t happy with just fixing the immediate issue, he wanted to get to the bottom of how this happened and how can they stop it in the future. He contacted a specialist cyber security company that was fairly local to them. Modesty forbids me to mention their name.

Once onsite they identified that there needs to be two strands to this. First and foremost, the company needs to be gotten up and running, which means restoring from backup. But there is no point doing that if the ransomware is still sitting on their systems because it would merely encrypt the backup. It’s never that easy. How did the ransomware get on the systems, how deeply is it embedded, how did it get on the cloud storage etc. How it got there was quite easily detected. It was simple email scam sent to around half of their workforce, at least two of whom clicked on it. Once that was done it spread itself around the system, infecting all connected machines, and easily jumped to the cloud storage and even the online backup, which was connected to the cloud storage itself.

From then it was a simple but painful exercise which took best part of a week to sort out. In order to be safe and thorough, all machines were wiped, including the operating systems, and then the OS reinstalled, along with all the applications. Meanwhile they worked with the cloud storage provider, who was cooperative, to clean up their servers. The data was then installed from the offline backup.

It was estimated that they lost money well into 6 figures, including fixing the problem, and lost business whilst it was all sorted out. Trying to get back the 3 days’ worth of data lost, was embarrassing. But at least they didn’t cave in to extortion as some might have, as we’ll see below. Luckily there was no indication of a data breach which sometimes accompanies ransomware attacks, so no involvement of the Information Commissioner and the embarrassment of having to contact clients about their personal information. It could have been worse.

Recommendations asked for by the board included:

Cyber Security Awareness training for all staff, including induction and 6 monthly refreshers.
Revisit the anti-virus/malware in use to see if there is a better solution for ransomware.
Revisit protections for the data itself. Do they know where it all is? Can it be audited? What about encrypting it themselves before anyone else can? It might not protect against ransomware, but if a data breach happens, it will avoid ICO fines.
Revisit the backup routines.
Have a solid disaster recovery and business continuity plan to avoid ad hoc and inevitable knee jerk responses.
The ransomware code required privileged access to do the real damage. It got it easily. Revisit the privileged access management system in place. Is it up to scratch?
Consider annual cyber security health checks.
Consider adhering to a standard such as Cyber Essentials or perhaps even ISO27000 series.

Company Two

Company Two was a transportation and storage company which operated from one site and its core business was transporting and storing produce before it was moved on to the consumer chain ie supermarkets and the like. As such they had 3 large cold stores which were of course temperature controlled and any prolonged period without temperature control could cost the business thousands in a relatively short space of time.

The problem was that their security architecture was still based on the old bastion model of having a secure perimeter, protected by firewalls, but once inside, there was no segmentation, ie once in, the world was your oyster and the temperature control systems were on the same network as the other IT systems, with nothing separating them.

At this point the same thing happened to them, as happened to Company One. They received the ransomware message which was even more damaging because it not only encrypted their data, but it knocked out the temperature control systems. This meant a more sophisticated attack than just embedding malware in an email, the attackers must have gotten into the system and identified a serious weakness that they could exploit.

This wasn’t as difficult as it seemed. There were several weaknesses in their defences. First, they had changed broadband provider, but the old broadband connection was still active and connected to their network. Second, they had security cameras which were remotely maintained. These cameras were also on the main network and therefore there was a remote backdoor into the system. There were other weaknesses, but these will do as explanations as to what happened.

As the gravity of the situation dawned on everyone, the decision was made to pay up and prevent a potential disaster in regard to the cold stores. Understandable I suppose but ultimately not a good solution. They did get back online within half a day. So far so good. But they wanted to make sure that this couldn’t happen again and so they called in some cyber experts to look things over. What was discovered was quite horrifying. Firstly, the attackers left a back door into the system which was discovered and closed down. This would have allowed the attackers easy access to do it all again. The issue with clicking on a dodgy link was also raised. But the real problem was that it was discovered that the ransomware attack was used to also disguise the theft of data. Missing was a considerable amount of financial information, including bank account details not just for them, but for their customers and suppliers, and PII relating to their customers and suppliers, but nothing too damaging other than business email and postal addresses. Luckily their HR and payroll was outsourced and so they held very little about their staff. Nevertheless, it was estimated that the cost of this breach would eventually reach 5 figures.

Lessons included very much the same as Company One but with the addition of having a security architecture review with the aim of tightening things up and introducing network segmentation.

Summary

Cyber security is a business issue not an IT issue. It’s the business that suffers, not the IT support.
Cyber Awareness training is the biggest and cheapest quick win that any company can take to protect itself.
Make sure your backups are adequate and up to date.
Make sure you have a disaster plan to recover from an attack.
Make sure you have a business continuity plan to continue working whist you recover from a disaster.
Make sure you privileged access management is adequate.
Make sure your anti-malware solution is the best available to protect against modern threats.
Don’t be complacent. Just because your cloud provider is popular, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s up to par.
Don’t rely on firewalls alone, the bastion model of security is well out of date now.
Consider adhering to a standard such as Cyber Essentials or perhaps even ISO27000 series.

Author: Kevin Hawkins