Today we were delighted to see the BBC encouraging their website readers to test their cybersecurity. With a number of increasingly difficult cyber quizzes, you can see how cyphers and codes work.
You can have a go yourself on their website by following this link.
Whilst the test is fun (until you get to question 4 and above and it becomes quite difficult) it does highlight some key points that we feel need stressing.
The first of these is “testing”. It is one of the the most common errors we find on just about any IT system we work on for the first time; the system hasn’t been tested and doesn’t actually work. this often relates to security as well as data back-ups.
We would go as far to say that there are thousands of systems out there that are merrily backing up nothing much every day. The only time anyone discovers this is just after some critical piece of data is lost and you go to retrieve it.
Test your system today, when there is no missing item to retrieve. Schedule a test every month or two, whatever is appropriate to the frequency of your data record saving. If you can recover that key file, be it accounts, production, design or customer records, fantastic you can sleep tonight. If you can’t, then at least you found out before it was lost forever and you have a much more serious issue on your hands.
The same thing applies with security. Try asking someone to break into your network. Sounds crazy but it might highlight issues that indicate you have a problem. Or it might allow you once again to sleep better tonight.
Complacency is the second problem. It won’t happen to us, we are too small.
There is no such thing anymore. Everyone can and will be targeted if not directly then by indiscriminate releases of malware.
Scheduling some regular tests on your own systems will ensure you take positive actions to be certain that things are working as you expect them to. No testing means that faults are only found when the size of the issue is much greater and possibly hugely expensive.
We would be happy to help you run some tests so please give us a call on 0161 660 5154.
