What do Hackney Council, Amex, Scottish Environmental Protection Agency, Foxton’s Estate Agent, Mersey Rail, Furniture Village and the Salvation Army all have in common? They all went public when hit by a ransomware attack in the first half of 2021.
That is not a complete UK list, and there are many more companies which have commercial motives for not going public.
Add to this the thousands which were scammed, bought stuff that never arrived, had their accounts hacked and their private information leaked to the dark web, then the scale of cybercrime is clearly out of control.
Many of the companies we talk to as business consultants want to bury their head in the sand.
It is too hard, won’t happen to them, costs money they don’t want to spend and they are too busy. And everyone is doing something – but not necessarily enough or the right thing.
When our own business was impacted, the virus got in despite our protection and Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation. So what went wrong?
This is such an old story. And it happened to us. Three people get an email purporting to be from a client with a link to a file share. It was credible that the client would do this.
The file share asked for a Windows password, and someone entered it. Human error is usually the root cause.
The upshot was that all the people we have ever emailed – our clients, prospects and associates – got the same email purporting to be from us ..
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