Back in November 2011, the UK government presented its plan for tackling the rising rate of cyber crime. With £650million of public funding behind the project it has four aims that they want achieved by 2015:
- The UK to tackle cyber crime and be one of the safest places in the world to do business in cyber space
- The UK to be more resilient to cyber attacks
- The UK to have helped shape an open, stable and vibrant cyberspace which the UK public can use safely and that supports open societies
- The UK to have all the necessary skills and technology in order to support the above objectives
In the UK’s strategy, it repeatedly mentions the importance of ensuring that businesses are up to date with the processes that they can follow to protect themselves against cyber crime and the threats that they could face. They say that by protecting businesses and educating them accordingly, it will be of huge benefit to the UK and encourage more and more companies to take the leap into the online world.
As more and more attacks on both a small and large scale take place, it has never been more important to ensure that your company is au fait with the up to date cyber security threats and ways that you can protect yourself. For example the attack on Sony in 2011 shocked everyone – the organisation reported to have lost $171 million as a direct result.
From credit card details being stolen, intellectual property copied or website’s being taken down, businesses owe it to themselves and their customers to put processes in place to avoid any attacks where possible.
One of the proposed actions the UK plans to take over the next four years is not only to educate individuals and companies, but also to make reporting a cyber attack far easier. While they don’t outline the exact process that will be implemented, they have said that they will also make it easier for the outcomes of the investigations to be publically available so that others may learn from it.
One very important part of the strategy is to create a ‘hub’ where information about cyber attacks, processes and approaches can be collated. The information will come from both Government and private sector sources and then fed back to key business sectors. They planned to trial this in December 2011 with five business sectors: defence, finance, telecommunication, pharmaceuticals, and energy. As of March 2012 more industries will have the updates fed back to them as well and the Government have said that they want to put together a process for SMEs to be able to benefit from the information gathered as well.
For more information about cyber security, head to the Get Safe Online website http://www.getsafeonline.org/
As the strategy is rolled out, it will be interesting to see whether the uptake of companies becoming certified with systems such as ISO 27001 or SSL in order to prove to their customers that they can be trusted increases.
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