Should you invest in your cyber security?

Many small businesses are in the eye of the storm and many are not prepared to proactively handle a cyber attack. Statistics show that the majority of SMEs go out of business within six months of a significant and successful cyber attack. Large enterprise are also increasingly scrutinising their supply chain for cyber risk and its only a matter of time before more robust cyber security resilience requirements to flow down to more SMEs. The UK government and the NCSC are increasingly working together to help protect UK SME businesses through advice, guidance in addition to GDPR standard setting. Protect your future profits by not letting cyber criminals damage your business reputation, disrupt operations and harm your client relationships.  

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1. Drives More Revenue

• Once your small business has an effective cyber security program in place you are ahead of the pack.
• Advertise it to your existing and potential clients as a form of assurance that you are resilient.
• Furthermore, if your cyber security program includes the right compliance certifications, you are now qualified to compete for contracts that were previously unavailable.
• These projects may include lucrative government and large enterprise contracts that formally require cyber security compliance to satisfy their risk requirements.
• All of these things are opportunities to increase your bottom line and the ultimate takeaway is that cyber security compliance is increasingly the key you need to open the door.

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2. Protects Your Reputation

• Customers and partners put a lot of faith into a company when they choose to do business with it.
• For larger companies, data breaches were found to cause a significant drop in share prices, and the impact on small businesses can be even more detrimental to reputation.
• For example, when IT management and security software company Kaseya experienced a ransomware attack their direct and downstream clients were all subjected to a supply chain software vulnerability, which resulted in widespread concern in the media, hurting Kaseya’s reputation.
• In another recent example, Costa Rica suffered a data breach by the prolific ransomware group Conti.
• Considering the importance of a national government’s ability to maintain public support and confidence in a government’s ability to protect its citizens.
• Even system downtime that causes service outages or failure to deliver products on time can hurt a business’s reputation.
• Although managers can issue apologies and offer to compensate for losses, the fact remains that it was a failure, which in turn can cause customers may move on to greener pastures.
• The bottom line is cyber breaches instill doubt in customers, damage a company’s reputation, and the impact can last indefinitely.

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3. Trains Employees On Security Best Practices

• The difference between taking an ad-hoc approach to cyber security and formalising a cyber security program with qualified professionals is enormous.
• Implementing industry standards and best practices across all of a business’s attack surfaces offers a strong measure of protection from cyber attacks and includes plans to minimize damage and fully recover if a successful attack does occur.
• An ad-hoc approach leaves security gaps that can be easily spotted and exploited by a skilled attacker.
• Social engineering attacks are the number one entry vector that gives an attacker a foothold in the victim’s environment.
• By educating staff about phishing, spear phishing, and vishing, a cyber security program reduces the chances of a successful attack on a small business by proactively providing the required knowledge and know-how.

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4. Provides A Safe Working Environment For Your Employees

• A complete cyber security program includes consideration for physical security controls.
• Physical security controls provide essential security assurances by directly limiting who can access computer systems that hold sensitive information, and evidence about the identities of individuals who have accessed sensitive areas.
• Physical controls include door locks, cabinet and drawer locks, security cables for computer systems themselves, and perhaps most importantly security surveillance camera systems.
• Deploying these security devices on premises not only serves to protect against potential cyber security breaches, but acts as deterrence and evidence to other forms of unwanted behavior such as physical violence and intimidation, theft, and sexual harassment; providing employees with a safer and more cohesive working environment.

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5. Builds Client Trust

• Implementing a cyber security program can come with certified evidence that your company is taking a serious approach to risk management.
• A typical cyber security program includes vulnerability scanning and may include penetration testing to verify that the implemented security controls are effectively enforcing strong security.
• These processes produce reports that can be used to demonstrate to customers, clients, and partners that you are taking a proactive approach to cyber risk mitigation.
• Furthermore, if your company’s cyber security program includes compliance certification, those successes should be communicated to build evidence based trust.

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6. Saves Money

• The costs of a data breach are higher than they have ever been and evidently higher than the costs of taking a proactive approach to cyber security.
• When caught unprepared to deal with the repercussions of a cyber attack, small businesses must immediately seek costly support from 3rd party cyber-security specialists.
• Taking a proactive approach to cyber security, both the number of incidents and the negative impact of an incident is reduced.
• Backups of systems, data, configurations, incident response, and disaster recovery plans enable a small business to quickly and routinely return to a secure and operational baseline, saving tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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7. Meets And Maintains Compliance

• Compliance attestation lets customers, partners, and potential partners know that you are serious as an organization and ready to go the extra mile to ensure resilience.
• From a broad perspective, cyber security compliance requires administrative, technical, and physical policies, controls, and standard operating procedures designed to ensure that strong measures are protecting a company’s assets and its customers’ data.
• Any company is at risk of becoming a victim of a cyber attack. But those that have achieved a compliance certification through their cyber security program have evidence of taking proactive action to prevent becoming a victim and are ready to respond to and recover from an attack incurring minimal damages.

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8. Protect Against Data Leakage

• Although direct financial gain from ransomware is the primary goal of most cybercrime today, the second most sought after gain for criminals is access to an organization’s proprietary information through data leakage.
• This may include sensitive information such as customer lists that may include names, email addresses, physical addresses and phone numbers, and personal or business information, or even proprietary R&D data, intellectual property, or trade secrets.
• A data security strategy is designed to protect sensitive data from being stolen.
• In the wrong hands, this information can give competitors an advantage, albeit an ill-gotten and unfair one.
• A proper cyber security program will include a data loss prevention strategy aimed at securing all data with appropriate levels of encryption when at-rest, in-transit, and in-use, and early identification of data exfiltration to block attempts to steal proprietary sensitive information.

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9. Establishes A Baseline For Continuous Monitoring

• Although a cyber security program consists of several components that function together to protect from all angles, one of the most key activities in a cyber security strategy is vulnerability management.
• Vulnerability management is the process of actively seeking potential vulnerabilities that an attacker could use to compromise an organisation’s assets, and remediating those vulnerabilities before they can be attacked.
• Vulnerability management also includes continuous monitoring via installation of IT security tools such as host or network based intrusion detection systems (HIDS and NIDS) that can detect suspicious activity and push alerts to the security team.
• More advanced host or network intrusion prevention systems (HIPS, and NIPS) that can take automated action to disable the attack before it can achieve its goals.
• The process of continuous monitoring also aims to reduce the dwell time for attacks that may have been partially successful or in an early stage compromise with the intention of launching a second stage of attack.

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10. Maintains System Uptime And Improves Productivity

• When a business’s digital systems are unavailable there are a host of negative impacts on operations.
• System downtime contributes to loss of productivity, wasted resources, and may cause a direct reduction in sales revenue if customer-facing services are unavailable.
• The secondary impact can lead to a loss of reputation, customer trust, causing further revenue losses.
• A cyber security program is generally concerned with protecting all aspects of the “CIA Triad” (confidentiality, integrity, and availability) of data, and includes security controls that are specifically architected to provide uptime guarantees via vulnerability management, incident response plans, backup and failover strategies, and disaster recovery plans.
• The result is high-availability business operations that can be sustained indefinitely.

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