It’s something of a cliché to say that hackers are shady types, often lurking in the shadows. Usually this is just a metaphor, though if you take stock imagery at face value, you’d be forgiven for thinking they only ever appear at night whilst wearing a hoodie. Like most clichés however, this contrivance does have an element of truth in it. The fact is that hackers often work just as hard to keep themselves and their tactics hidden as they do to find vulnerabilities to exploit.

2020 has been a quite the year for headline-grabbing data breaches thanks to a combination of record-breaking numbers and behind-the-hack tales. Despite huge investments in security tools and awareness, organisations of all sizes have struggled to fully protect their data from cyber criminals.

At Bulletproof, we know that different people learn in different ways. So when a healthcare provider came to us needing an innovative, engaging way of delivering security awareness training, we stood ready to deliver. The healthcare provider in question was St Andrews Healthcare – providers of specialist care for people with challenging mental health needs. Being a company that works with vulnerable individuals, staff awareness of cyber security is essential.

Bulletproof has released its Annual Cyber Security Industry Report 2021, where we look at the security challenges facing businesses in 2021 and discover what organisations can do to stay ahead of the hackers. In this blog we highlight 4 key findings from the report and explore what they mean for business’ security in 2021 and beyond.

The term "hacker" gets thrown around in a variety of contexts and in a multitude of different ways nowadays. While it's great that cybersecurity is gaining more and more awareness across the globe, the technical nature of cybersecurity means that terms are often used interchangeably, in different contexts, and sometimes incorrectly.

As legislation goes, the GDPR could be unique in its insistence that a new professional role, the Data Protection Officer (DPO), be created to ensure its mandates are properly met. But getting a DPO in place is no simple recruitment exercise, and that’s especially true for schools. For starters, people with the requisite mix of abilities and experience to do the job in educational environments are hard to find.

As any seasoned cyber security professional will tell you, good security only works when it’s embedded as culture within an organisation – and that must come from the top. But sometimes, the top doesn’t want to know. Even with recent events highlighting the vital importance of cyber security and the average cost of a breach reaching an eye-watering £3 million, many organisations still struggle to get security on the boardroom agenda.

Working remotely has its own personal challenges in terms of productivity: between the cat walking across your keyboard and the kids dropping in on your Zoom meetings, workers across the globe have had to adjust to doing their job in a different way. Organisations also had to swiftly transition to employees working remotely, and this has introduced a new set of risks from a cyber security perspective.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, many organisations have had to make a swift transition to remote working to ensure business continuity. What would typically take months of planning and preparation was implemented in a matter of days. The chaos that this created, combined with the already uncertain nature of life during a pandemic, had created the ideal environment for cybercriminals.

GDPR recently breezed past its second birthday and, like many two-year-olds, continues to cause concern and confusion for those who have to deal with it. Unlike real two-year-olds, however, GDPR is quite clear in what it demands and there could be big consequences if they are not met. For businesses, failure to meet GDPR’s requirements represents an increased risk of data breaches and the reputational damage and legal repercussions that breaches inevitably lead to.