This week we take a look at some recommendations received from two trusted sources to see how they are helping with the fight against Cyber Crime.

The first is from the Institute of Directors and comes with the title “Cyber Crime: 10 things every business leader should know“. The second is from industry heavyweight HP and is entitled “Cloud security not just an IT question”.

So firstly they both recognise that IT security is not just a departmental responsibility, it must be understood and managed from the board downwards across the entire structure of your operation. Failures will affect everyone to some degree or another and may have a significant, possibly catastrophic financial impact on your business.

The IOD also points out that the number of criminals is growing as many different groups become involved in hacking.

The issue is no longer a simple one of theft of data for criminals to exploit or sell on, attacks are coming from “vigilante” hacktivist groups who may not agree with some element of your business activities, as well as more extreme terrorist and even state sponsored examples looking to do harm on a large scale across entire sectors.

The “Internet of Things” is also making it harder to manage as you must not consider the issue to be related only to your computers. An ever increasing number of devices are effectively computer-driven and therefore have the same vulnerabilities, often with more serious implications if they stop working.

Small companies are increasingly connected to big companies, so are a very popular target as they may be the gateway to access the much larger target. Recent figures however indicate firms that turnover less the £100m actually cut their IT security spending last year rather than increasing it.

Everyone needs to understand and implement cyber security as part of their daily work. There are no short cuts that won’t be exploited by criminals and the implications of a breach are so far reaching every employee has a duty of care to both the organisation and their customers.

If you are struggling to keep ahead with your own IT and cloud security plan. then please give IGC a call, we would be glad to come and review things with you and see if there any vulnerabilities in your system.