Six Cyber Security Lessons from Our First Cyber University Seminar

Six Cyber Security Lessons from Our Experts

Our cyber experts Andy Swift, Chris Cooper, JP Cavanna, Lee Larsen and Robert Sugrue were joined at our first Cyber University seminar by Microsoft’s UK Partner Solutions Lead for Security, Katrina Borthwick. Together, here are six of the key cyber security lessons they imparted:

• Cyber security is the world’s top business risk. Cybercrime is increasing in size and complexity. It is the world’s top business risk, costing billions of dollars in damage annually. The industrialisation of the cybercrime economy lowers the skill barrier to entry, meaning more and more people have access to the tools and infrastructure they need to create cyber chaos. If your organisation isn’t addressing the cyber risks it faces, it should be.
• Nation state threats are increasing. During a session on the Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2022, delegates learned that the supply chain is being used as part of an increased targeting of critical infrastructure – particularly the IT sector, financial services, transport systems, and communications infrastructure. Cyber mercenaries threaten the stability of cyberspace as a growing industry of private companies is developing and selling advanced tools, techniques, and services to enable their clients – often governments – to break into networks and devices.
• Organisations need to accept that incidents will occur. Accepting that at some point your organisation will be compromised is an essential element of achieving cyber resilience. Cyber resilience accepts incidents will occur and asserts that the organisation’s power of response is as important as its power of control. Today, cyber resilience is every bit as important as cyber security.
• Achieving cyber resilience involves people, processes, and technology. End-to-end, scalable cyber resilience requires a combination of people, processes, and technology. People are the key components to consider when you administer and protect your organisation’s assets; processes and policy provide the framework for governance and also define procedures that can be measured over time; and technology is the hardware and software used to achieve reliable cyber security.
• Ensure you can detect, respond, and recover from incidents. If you accept that cyber incidents will happen, you should ensure you can detect them in a timely manner. Your response supports the ability to contain the impact of a cyber security incident. And a recovery plan supports timely recovery to normal operations to reduce the impact from a cyber security incident.
• The best place to start is establishing your cyber security maturity. Every organisation is at a different stage on its cyber security journey. How do you know what next step is best for you? Six Degrees’ Cyber Security Maturity Assessment assesses your cyber security maturity against established industry benchmarks. A report provides a prioritised action plan that shows how you can identify the greatest threats to your organisation, recommends how you can prioritise your cyber security investments, and enables you to better gauge the value and level of return from every cyber security investment.

Improving our Cyber Understanding Together

The cyber security landscape is constantly evolving, with new risks emerging all the time. By understanding how and why hackers may seek to target us, and by staying on top of the latest best practices to stop them, we will reduce the cyber security risks we face as individuals and together through the organisations we work for and with.

Cyber University is an ongoing series of seminars. The next event takes place on Thursday 2^nd February at the Charlotte Street Hotel, London. Register today!