As organisations across the world look forward to the holiday season, it’s worth reviewing the perspective of data thieves and cyber attackers.
- If key staff are on holiday, cyber security defences will be weaker and less agile.
- If remaining staff are thinking about their holiday, the likelihood of them being hooked by a cunning phishing email is much higher.
- If management is also in holiday mode, a cyber breach is likely to go undetected and unreported for even longer than usual.
What should that mean for organisations – and particularly for the approximately 80% of UK organisations that are not yet GDPR-compliant?
It should mean that cyber security defences, incident reporting and staff training (particularly around phishing and security awareness) are significantly enhanced to counter the increased likelihood of attack.
Most organisations, however, will adopt the same approach that many people do with the sun – too much sun, too quickly, without the appropriate SPF level of sun cream leads to sun burn, sun stroke and increased longer term risk of skin cancer. And the problem is that you can’t undo the damage – you just have to suffer.
Inadequate cyber security has exactly the same short and long term impact on an organisation. If you’re not breach ready, you’re going to suffer both short- and long-term damage because, once the breach that you didn’t think would happen to you has actually happened, you can’t go back in time and apply the appropriate security protection.
Don’t get burnt this summer – get breach ready.
