Last year we stumbled across quite a few articles and blog posts about how UK businesses would rather pay ransom fees than invest in cyber defences. Anyone else’s jaw on the floor after reading that, because ours certainly were!

On the 5th of June 2018, research released from NTT Security ahead of Infosecurity Europe 2018, found that a 5th of UK businesses would rather pay a ransom fee than invest more money in their cyber security now. Globally that figure goes up to one third!  That means there are thousands of companies out there who have actively decided to do nothing to proactively improve their cyber security. So, we have to ask, why would businesses make such a decision? The only reason we can come up with, is to try and save money and that really is a false economy.

Not only has there been some very recent examples of how devastating cyber attacks can be (WannaCry and Petya spring to mind straight away) there’s also no guarantee that cyber attackers will even honour the ransom once it’s paid, so all that money could go straight to waste. This “fix it when it’s broken” attitude to cyber security is short term, reactive and funds an incredibly destructive criminal enterprise and here at Dynamic at least, we think all that needs to change.

One of the biggest barriers to better cyber security across most businesses is education and awareness. It’s one thing for the management to decide on and implement a security policy but if knowledge of that policy isn’t filtered down through the business, how an earth can you expect it to be followed? This type of awareness is one that businesses need to take upon themselves to improve in the future.

Educating businesses in general on how vulnerable they are to a cyber attack is also vital because many seem to think it simply “won’t happen to me”. Need we reiterate that the UK is the “most breached” country in Europe? This type of general education and industry awareness is an area where we can help.

Cyber security is our bread and butter here at Dynamic Networks. Not only do we take it seriously for our own business and infrastructure, but we also help clients across Leeds and the surrounding areas on tackling their own cyber security, we blog about it regularly and we have experts in house that know how to deter cyber attackers.

If you’re concerned about your own cyber security then at the very least, make sure you educate yourself by browsing through our recent blogs or a best, why not give us a call to talk through your options?

Thankfully there is one silver lining from the NTT research; the UK was the least likely of the twelve nations surveyed in the NTT research to pay ransom over investing in cyber security and UK businesses were the most likely to have an information security policy in place (although in most cases it was admitted that only 30% of employees were actually aware of said policy).

Most reassuringly of all, 63% of UK businesses had also implemented a cyber response plan, the highest percentage of all the nations surveyed. So, there’s some hope for the UK at least, make sure you’re one of the UK businesses that’s prepared not prey.