DEBATE CYBER SECURITY
IN ASSOCIATION WITH:
PRESENT: Richard Slater Lancashire Business View (chair)
Paula Ardron-Gemmell Pink Tree Parties
Lee Church Oldham Engineering
Gary Clifton Partners&
Steven Cole Ansuka
Ben Duckworth Craggs Energy Group
Mark Edwards Seriun
Dan Giannasi
North West Cyber Resilience Centre Lee Gibson
Myerscough College Jamie Griffin
Alexander Grace Law Shafiq Khan
East Lancashire Chamber of Commerce Jon Lomas
Lancaster University COUNTING THE COST OF CYBERCRIME
No organisation is immune from a cyber assault: big business, small business, public sector. With IT support experts Seriun, we brought together those who have faced the grim reality of a cyber assault, those who police online crime and those who work to prevent, mitigate and repair the damage. We met at Crow Wood Hotel and Spa Resort in Burnley
Lee Gibson, Myerscough College
On August 20, 2018, the day GCSE results were released, at three in the morning, we had a ransomware attack. Across five campuses, we lost everything.
They got into the backups and they took everything. We had one laptop on our
network that wasn’t affected. The ransom demand was 49 Bitcoins, valued at £500,000 in 2018. We refused and that was the end of the conversation.
Four years on, we’re all on SharePoint. Cyber Essentials is our standard. Today two factor authentication is mandatory and Cyber Safe is mandatory training for all staff. Once a month I get two questions fired at me about cyber safety.
We had to rebuild the business one computer at a time. It took two years and we’ve still got stuff we can’t access. It’s just gone. Everything in HR disappeared completely.
They reckon we weren’t targeted, it was just one of those things. They got in through a member of staff’s password and sat there for months just watching what was happening. They were waiting for a domain user.
It was one of the poor guys in IT who was doing something late at night and he didn’t close down properly and they got into the domain and they ruined us. It was devastating for people and four years down the line the impact on them is still there.
Ben Duckworth, Craggs Energy Group
We are a collection of five limited companies that sit in the fuel, green energy and infrastructure space. We’ve got 160 people and our turnover is more than £100m.
We’ve had two issues in recent years. In the first, our Facebook company pages, were managed by a staff member. Unfortunately, their personal email was compromised. Those behind it reset the Facebook password and by doing that had the ability to get into our accounts and in theory could take over all our brands.
However, they were only interested in three where we had historically done advertising. They assigned themselves as business manager and started spending money.
Even though the card details had expired, they didn’t need to be in date for a transaction to take place. If that card still exists in some form, you can spend money, which is what they did across the three brands to a value of about £14,000 in about 24 hours.
Fortunately, our bank was fantastic. The monies were immediately refunded. We’ve learned to make sure that our brands are separated from an administrative perspective.
The second story is simpler. We had a new marketing team member who received an email said to be from the MD asking them to go and buy Amazon vouchers for a staff incentive and to reply with the codes. We’ve now implemented cyber training as part of our induction process.
LANCASHIREBUSINESSVIEW.CO.UK
21
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80
