The North West Regional Organised Crime Unit (NWROCU) provides specialist capabilities to tackle serious and organised crime that crosses borders in the region. The NWROCU tackles cyber-crimes, which include all cyber-dependent or ‘pure cyber-crimes’, as they are known, costing the UK economy billions of pounds each year.

Jennie Williams gave an insight into some of the top tips businesses, small and large, should consider to protect themselves against the increasingly sophisticated cyber-attacks.

Protect your business through the four Ps -

Williams highlighted the significance of working with the four Ps of the counter-terrorism model:

Prepare – deal with cyber incidents and ensure businesses have a continuity strategy in place. Staff need to know what to do and how to respond. Businesses should prepare as much as possible for the threats we know about.

Protect – work with businesses and the public and offer free advice to stay safe, ensuring protection is in place to avoid an attack.

Pursue – don’t let the ‘geeky gods’ win. Always report cyber-crimes as this helps the police to arrest offenders once their equipment has been seized.

Prevent – prevent young people becoming cyber criminals and harness their skills through positive diversion and support. Without a positive influence, online gangs can target cyber-savvy youngsters and recruit them into organised crime gangs.

Biggest threats to businesses

The Insider

The insider remains the biggest threat to cyberattacks. Both current and former employees have unique access to steal data, money and passwords. They are also most likely to make basic human errors, such as succumbing to a phishing attack.

Police are now warning businesses about the accessibility to company-owned machines through USB ports and other removable storage devices. Explaining the reasoning behind restricting access to these devices will involve employees in the security process and educate them about the threats they pose.

When staff leave a business and are preparing to depart, it’s essential to monitor their online activity and access to files, and to take note of any unusual behaviour. If the leaver is moving to a competitor, businesses need to be confident that they aren’t relinquishing commercial data.

When small businesses grow quickly, it can be easy to lose sense of admin rights and file structures. There needs to be a nominated person to stay on top of this. It’s all too easy for too many people in a business to have admin rights and lock down file structures, ensuring only nominated people in the business have access.

Lack of training

Simple, easy advice given to staff can help to make it very clear where a breach has been committed. Companies have dismissed staff members who have then logged on remotely to the system. In their defence, they claimed to have not been told that their access had been removed.

Having a clear line of where cyber-security lies helps protect both employer and employee…

To see the remainder of the article and discover Jennie’s top four trending cyber-security threats. You can download the Cyber Landscape eBook here.

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