HR is one of the most important departments in any business, essential for many functions but also at huge risk when it comes to cybercrime. They would seem to be a perfect target; potentially low technical knowledge, high volumes of trusted partners and networks, interactions with untrusted contacts along with lots of sensitive personal and business data.

And with 43% of small and medium businesses being affected by cybercrime, it is not an IF you are attacked it’s a WHEN. So be ahead of the criminal and avoid the losses in time, money and reputation that a successful cyber-attack might bring, with the free tools and services available today.

What tools do I need?

This is down to your company, its size, and the operations that it undertakes. For example, the free online staff awareness training might be great for a small team which hasn’t had any training in the past, but if you are an established firm, this might be too basic for you.

You also need to consider what you already have and what support you have both internally and externally. If you have an external IT company, then discuss these tools with them and see if they would work for your network.

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” cyber course giving easy to understand guidance about the 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 and keep up to date with the latest cyber alerts.

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.

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 obtain a free, no obligation quote so you can see how affordable our services are, and we don’t sell any products so you can be assured that the report you get will be unbiased.

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, call us for a chat.

We can provide:

• Security Awareness Training
• Vulnerability Assessments
• Internet Discovery
• Policy Review

Why not find out more?

Policing led – business focused.