FEATURE | Cyber Security
Project Fear
Is this how FDs are being scared into taking on the cyber-criminals?
Paul Simmonds considers how fear, uncertainty and doubt are fuelling company spend on IT
T
dofonline.co.uk
o scare the finance director into allocating some more budget to information security, the IT folk, or the salesman from the company trying to sell you the latest security
gizmo, will usually employ a large amount of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt); with headlines like: 5 The UK National Crime Agency says cyber- crime currently makes up more than 50% of the crimes committed in the UK.
5 TalkTalk lost 101,000 customers and suffered costs of £60m as a result of a cyber-attack on the company.
5 Under the new General Data Protection Regulation you can be fined up to 4% of global turnover for a data breach.
SO ARE YOU SAFE? The quick answer is no. Even if you think you are not a target, that doesn’t mean you won’t be attacked; the working assumption should be that every company has suffered multiple security incidents in the last year and those that say ‘not me’ just don’t have the monitoring in place to detect it.
But ‘we have firewalls and all our PC’s have anti-virus’ is oſten the retort ‘so we are protected (and doing enough)’ – to which the answer is: definitely not. The truth is that most exploits are designed to totally bypass the firewall, while most traditional anti-virus solutions are at best 50% effective.
SO WHO IS OUT THERE ATTACKING YOU? To better understand where you should be investing in information security you first need to understand who is attacking companies today and their motivation. 5 Individuals who target sensitive data that they can sell on to interested parties. These form two sorts of attacks;
5 The adversary that deliberately targets your company for information they know or suspect you have.
5 The automated malware that attacks companies at random, but ‘phones home’ when it successfully infects a system - either sending any data it finds back home automatically, or becoming a gateway for the attacker to further explore inside your organisation. R
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