You may think that only large firms and multinationals need to worry about things such as cyber security, but even contractors need to be aware of the dangers!
Whether you’re a limited company contractor or an umbrella company worker, cyber security has begun to grow into something that you used to just think about in passing to something that you actually have to worry about – that is if the Federation of Small Businesses can be believed. In fact, the FSB recently announced that the impact of cyber crime is actually quite massive, with the organisation estimating that as much as £800 billion is lost every year by small and medium-sized businesses through cyber attacks.
More than 4 out of every FSB members indicated in a recent poll that they had been victimised by cyber crime in 2012 alone. The financial losses averaged around £4,000 each, says the trade industry body, with the most common form of cyber attack being a computer virus of some kind; one out of every five firms reported having to deal with a virus of some sort or another.
The government has been hard at work to curb cyber attacks on UK businesses and has since launched several new schemes in order to provide aid to firms dealing with the growing tide of hacking attempts. One such initiative is the Innovation Voucher scheme from the Technology Strategy Board, a programme that the TSB just extended in an attempt to aid SMEs in shoring up their defences in order to ward off these cyber attacks.
On top of that, the government has also been attempting to glean additional information o what kind of threats not just UK firms have been facing but the types of cyber attacks their own government departments are having to cope with as well. The raw intelligence gathered by these efforts is set to be disseminated through a new cyber security partnership in order to provide as much help as possible in thwarting the efforts of anyone with a computer and a rotten conscience.
If you ask me, it’s a brilliant move and hopefully it will result in facilitating both the government and the UK private sector’s hardening of their cyber defences. No one likes having their bank accounts hacked or online retail websites shut down, after all!
