Often charities and other similar organisations will put cyber security at the back of their mind due to preconceived notions regarding how long it takes to implement and the difficulty in managing it. However, vulnerability assessments are a great method of quickly and easily reviewing your IT security posture.
According to Forbes in 2021, 20.4% of all discovered vulnerabilities were either high-risk or critical-risk and likely to result in the compromise of services or data. Exploitation of these vulnerabilities is often trivial, however so is remediating. For businesses, the difficulties often lie in identifying vulnerabilities, which is where vulnerability assessments are incredibly useful.
Vulnerability assessments are a systematic review of security weaknesses in an information system, looking at configurational issues and patching levels while offering remediation advice. By assigning severity levels to the issues identified, it allows you to fix the most important issues first, before moving onto lower severity problems.
Here at the ECRC, we offer affordable Cyber Security and Resilience Services through our free core membership, including three types of vulnerability assessments:
By regularly carrying out vulnerability assessments, you are ensuring no virtual back door is left open for a hacker to sneak through.
The impact of a successful attack can be devastating, but there are simple methods to protect yourself against these common attacks.
Here at the centre, we would advise you to do three things now:
If you are a business, charity or other organisation which is currently suffering a live cyber-attack (in progress), please call Action Fraud on 0300 123 2040 immediately. This service is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Please report online to Action Fraud, the UK's national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime. You can report cybercrime online at any time using the online reporting tool, which will guide you through simple questions to identify what has happened. Action Fraud advisors can also provide the help, support, and advice you need.
If you suspect a phishing attack, please report it to the Suspicious Email Reporting Services (SERS) set up by the NCSC at: report@phising.gov.uk
Text messages can be forwarded to 7726
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