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Over the course of this week, every single member of the Mila team has undergone an online cyber-security course.
There’s been widespread coverage in the national press of the ransomware attack that hit Safestyle at the end of January, and I’m aware of at least one other big fabricator who has been the victim of a hacking event over the past couple of weeks. It just shows that it can happen to any business – no matter the size or the sector, and the operational disruption can be massive, whether you pay the ransom or not.
I don’t know the details of these incidents obviously, or where the attacks came from, but it reminded us here just how important it is to protect your business from cyber-attack.
Clearly, the risk can come from anywhere at any time, and while you’ve got people working from home, there’s an extra layer of vulnerability which wouldn’t necessarily be there if everyone was working on the same secure network.
We’ve already dialled our Mimecast settings up a notch as you’d expect, but what we learnt from the course is that cyber-attacks don’t usually happen because of IT failings; they happen because individuals drop their guard.
That could be anything from logging onto an unsecured network in a coffee shop or not double checking the email address of a sender before you open an attachment.
Erring on the side of caution, at Mila, we’ve advised our team that if they are in any doubt as to whether an email is real or not, they should not open it or click on any content, rather they should ring the sender instead to check.
I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that two window companies were hit within a couple of weeks, or if there’s just a general rise in cybercrime as a result of the current tensions with Russia, but the danger is definitely out there.
Please take extra care with everything you do online – and please let us know if you think anything you’ve sent through to us at Mila hasn’t made it through our newly heightened Firewall!
Thank you
Richard
