Cybersecurity has been a prevailing global concern since the early days of the digital revolution, and has only increased in importance as more and more of our infrastructural systems come to rely on digital interconnectivity.
In 2024 alone, and in the UK alone, businesses were unfortunate enough to experience well over 7.8 million cyber-crimes. These crimes span widely in intent and impact, but can also affect everything from a business’ financial standing to its reputational standing – and far beyond. Proactive data protection measures are nothing short of essential for any business to safeguard their assets and maintain customer trust.
Why Cyber Threats Are Increasing
Cyber threats are on the rise, even if only for the simple fact that industries and economies are more reliant on digital technologies than ever before. The dramatic pace of digital transformation has not only imbued businesses with powerful cutting-edge tools for furthering their trade, but also cyber-criminals with their own cutting-edge tools for exploiting business’ weaknesses and extracting value of their own.
The most common form of cyber-crime is that of phishing; phishing is a basic scam, whereby a scammer pretends to contact a business or employee from an official source – be it a bank or an executive member of staff – in order to solicit confidential information.
Login information can then be used to steal business assets, or bank details can then be used to directly steal money. This simple but effective scam has been made more effective by the roll-out of AI language models like ChatGPT, which can more accurately impersonate real people.
The Consequences
The consequences of cyber-crime are too broad to cover in any meaningful sense here, but suffice to say that every aspect of a business’ operation can be targeted by cyber-crime. Phishing scams in particular can target a broad variety of ends, whether confidential business information, the private details of customers or simply account information to transfer money out from under the business’ nose.
More overt examples of the cost of cyber-crime present with ransomware attacks, such as a recent attack on NHS-affiliated testing facility Synnovis – which resulted in the stealing of confidential patient data.
Key Cybersecurity Steps
Thankfully, there are numerous steps a business can take to improve their resilience to cyber-attacks and their consequences. A great long-term defence, firstly, would be to engage with data protection lawyers who specialise in cyber-crime; these professionals can provide targeted advice with respect to your own exposure to data breaches.
The next-most important thing you can do, by far, is to train your staff against cyber-vulnerability. While many like to think of cyber-criminals as sophisticated hackers that infiltrate back-end systems clandestinely, the reality is that most businesses are impacted by phishing scams – enabled by poor training of the staff that fall victim to them. Regular courses on what to look out for in a phishing scam are encouraged, so as not to see new staff members fall through the cracks.
Finally, ensuring all your systems are as up-to-date and secure as possible can dramatically reduce the chance of a ransomware attack. Highly publicised ransomware attacks like those on NHS facilities were often a result of facilities running old and outdated software, hence being uniquely vulnerable to exploitation.