The construction industry is a key target for cybercriminals, not just because of the valuable data that they hold but also because of the latest technological integrations aren’t always as secure as they could be.

So here is a list of free tools that your construction business can utilise to build your resilience, without the headache over cost.

Non-technical tools

Membership with the Eastern Cyber Resilience Centre – sign up for our free membership and receive a monthly newsletter as well as our “Little Steps” emails giving easy to understand guidance about steps you need to implement to achieve Cyber Essentials. You can also access our affordable student services and our Forum where you can meet others in your situation.

NCSC Cyber Action Plan - Learn how to protect yourself or your small business online with the Cyber Aware Action Plan. Answer a few questions on topics like passwords and two-factor authentication, and get a free personalised list of actions that will help you improve your cyber security. This is a great place to start your resilience journey and quickly identify areas that need improvement.

Incident Response Plan - To help you minimise the impact of a cyber-attack we have created a Cyber Incident Response Plan for you to use. Create a plan and then use Exercise in a box to test its effectiveness.

NCSC Exercise in a Box - An online tool which helps organisations test and practise their response to a cyber-attack. It is completely free, and you don’t have to be an expert to use it. It includes two exercises, a technical simulation, and a table-top exercise. You just need to register for an account. If you are not confident of running this aloe, your local cyber protect officer can help you for free (no strings attached). Contact us for more details.

NCSC Board Toolkit - Boards are pivotal in improving the cyber security of their organisations. The Board Toolkit has been designed to help board members get to grips with cyber security and know what questions they should be asking their technical experts.

NCSC Cyber Security Training for Staff - Your staff are your first line of defence against a cyber-attack. The NCSC has developed an e-learning training package ‘Stay Safe Online: Top Tips for Staff’ to help educate your staff on a range of key areas including phishing, using strong passwords, securing your devices and reporting incidents.

Technical tools

NCSC Early Warning – receive high level alerts, in daily and weekly summaries, based on your IP and domain names, containing:

• Incident notifications suggesting an active compromise of your system. This might be a host on your network being infected with malware.
• Network Abuse Events suggesting your assets have been associated with malicious or undesirable activity. This might be a client on your network found scanning the internet.
• Vulnerability and Open Port Alerts suggesting vulnerable services running on your network, or undesired applications are exposed to the internet, such as an exposed Elasticsearch service.

Police CyberAlarm - help your business understand and monitor malicious cyber activity. Police CyberAlarm acts like a "CCTV camera" monitoring the traffic seen by a member's connection to the internet. It detects and provide regular reports of suspected malicious activity, enabling organisations to minimise their vulnerabilities. Vulnerability Scanning can be added and used to scan an organisations website and external IP addresses.

NCSC Logging Made Easy - helps organisations to install a basic logging capability on their IT estate enabling routine end-to-end monitoring of Windows systems. Logging is crucial if you want to detect and catch cyber attackers. LME can:

• Tell you about software patch levels on enrolled devices
• Show where administrative commands are being run on enrolled devices
• See which users are using which machine
• In conjunction with threat reports, LME allows you to search for the presence of an attacker in the form of Tools, Techniques and Procedures (TTPs)

NCSC Scanning Made Easy – a collection of NMAP Scripting Engine Scripts, designed to help system owners and administrators find systems with specific vulnerabilities. The script will output simple-to-read results including a description of the vulnerability and a link to the vendor security advisory. Running this script often and following the linked vendor advice will help to keep your network secure.

Affordable services

Ok, these aren’t free, but they are affordable (and I do mean affordable). We want every company operating to be able to access essential cyber resilience services. All the services are bespoke to your company so pricing is based on what you need.

You can a free, no obligation quote so you can see how affordable our services are.

We work with local universities to identify students who have the skills and aptitude to work in the cyber industry. They are trained and mentored by senior ethical hackers to be able to deliver these students. They get amazing real-world experience, while your company gets an amazing service from students who are enthusiastic and dedicated to getting it right.

If you would like to know more about the programme, book a chat.

Internal Vulnerability Assessment - Find out how much damage an attacker could do if they did manage to breach your network or launch an attack from the inside. The objective of an Internal Vulnerability Assessment is to safeguard the network’s assets that could be exploited to interfere with the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of your network.

Remote Vulnerability Assessment - We can scan your network remotely, like an attacker might, and see if there are obvious weaknesses present which they might choose to exploit.

Web Application Vulnerability Assessment - How secure is your website? Does it contain vulnerabilities just waiting to be exploited? Our assessments can help identify these weaknesses so you can fix them.

Individual Internet Investigation - Harvesting online information about senior team members in your business can help an attacker craft a convincing phishing email. Find out what exists online about you and your team, and how it could be used in an attack.

Corporate Internet Investigation - Find out what information an attacker can gather about your business and how it can be used in a cyber-attack.

Security Policy Review - Find out how robust your current cyber security policies are and what can do to improve them. 

Cyber Business Continuity Exercise - A cyber table top exercise helps identify issues in the Cyber aspects of your company’s current business continuity plan, including emergency response plans, disaster recovery plans and backup integrity testing. 

Security Awareness Training - Your people can be your biggest asset and with security awareness training they can become highly effective barriers to cyber-crime. Security awareness training provides simple and effective knowledge for people to understand their environment and provides the confidence to challenge when something doesn’t look right.

Further guidance & support

The Eastern Cyber Resilience Centre is a not-for-profit membership organisation, run by policing, with the intention of increasing cyber resilience of SMEs within the East of England.

You can contact the Cyber Resilience Centre for guidance and support through our e-mail enquiries@ecrcentre.co.uk or use our online booking system to make an appointment with one of our team.

We also provide free guidance on our website and we would always encourage you to sign up for our free core membership. Core members receive regular updates which include the latest guidance, news, and security updates. Our core membership has been tailored for businesses and charities of all sizes who are based across the seven counties in the East of England.

Policing led – business focussed.