Security SHRINKING
TARGETS, RISING RISKS
SMEs now face the same calibre of cyberattacks once reserved for enterprisescale victims, with smaller MSPs increasingly in the firing line. Will Ashford Brown explains how threat patterns have shifted over the past year, and why the channel must adapt fast.
What are the biggest cyber threats now affecting smaller Managed Service Providers and their SME customers, and how have these shifted over the past year? UK companies face a far greater cyber-attack surface than ever before. Whilst state-sponsored threats are increasingly prevalent as the world shifts to an alliance structure based on the two world powers of the US and China, cyber criminals motivated by money and notoriety are also multiplying and perpetrating some of the most impactful cyber-attacks to date – cast your mind back to last year’s attack on Jaguar Land Rover, which is thought to have cost the business over £2 billion. Enabled by AI, both of these threat actors are becoming ever more effective, with opaque supply chains frequently seen as the soft underbelly to get into large corporate or government institutions.
Many MSPs feel overwhelmed by the volume of security tools on the market. What should
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they look for to judge whether a solution genuinely improves resilience rather than adding complexity? Unfortunately, the growing sophistication of malicious cyber actors and the broadening of corporations’ attack surfaces – as a result of shiſts to increased digitisation – have resulted in what can feel like an overwhelming volume of cyber security tools available on the market. To plug all of these ‘cyber gaps’, businesses need ‘defence in depth’ – that is to say, they need access to a broad range of cyber security tools, and there’s no getting past this. However, businesses can be smart when assessing tools, prioritising integration with existing solutions and steering clear of siloed tools.
What emerging technologies or approaches do you think will shape the next phase of cyber resilience for smaller organisations? AI in the cybersecurity space is proving to be a game-changer – rather than replacing humans in Security Operations Centres (SOCs), it is
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