Ministry of Defence Data Breach May 2024
Serving UK military employees have been involved in a significant data breach that targeted the Ministry of Defence. Personal data has been taken through a third-party payroll system that includes information on current and past members of the military, which may include their addresses too. To combat the attack, the Ministry of Defence immediately took their systems offline, stopping the hackers from retrieving any more data.
Robust cyber security is necessary for any size and type of business. Staying protected and keeping up-to-date with training to avoid the threats and consequences of a successful cyber attack is crucial, but what other things can you do to keep you safe?
Let’s take a look at what some of the consequences of cyber security breaches can be and how Comms Express can help you to solve these.
Why are data breaches threatening to your business?
The leaking or theft of sensitive data can be an issue for businesses or institutions like the government, for a few reasons, such as:
Legal Repercussions
The Information Commissioner Office is the UK’s independent body that ensures information rights are upheld. If businesses do not adhere to policies like GDPR compliance, then they may face legal repercussions like lawsuits, penalties, and fines. The ICO has the power to fine businesses 4% of their annual turnover. In 2023, TikTok received a £12.7m fine for failing to carry out proper checks to prevent under-13-year-olds from using the platform. With unforeseen and possibly large penalties and fines, not being fully compliant with GDPR can have a life-changing effect on your business.
Privacy Violation
People hand over data to businesses with trust. Violations of privacy, such as leaks or thefts of information can lead to bigger issues for example, the theft of personal information can lead to identity theft and fraud. Furthermore, customers will lose trust in a business even if their data hasn’t been breached, going to another competitor for the same services.
Financial Consequences
A data breach can lead to huge financial consequences for the company. If hackers violate data privacy and steal personal or business information, this can lead to events like fraudulent transactions, drained bank accounts, and loans taken out in someone else’s name, etc. Therefore, privacy, as mentioned above, goes hand in hand with avoiding any financial consequences of leaving your data and company data unprotected.
Reputation
For any business, data from their customers is a crucial part of their success. They want to know who you are and give you the best experience with their products or services. However, if your business suffers a data breach, this can lead to customers losing trust in you to look after their personal information. This means, that they may withdraw their data or may not offer it up in the future. Overall, this sends a message that your business is untrustworthy. So, you want to ensure that customer data is safe to further your buyer-consumer relationship.
Business Disruption
With the news of a data breach, business slows down, affecting your overall success. The issue needs to be sorted, which means deploying people to solve the issue. Loss of personal data also means getting in contact with the individuals who have had their information stolen, doing whatever is needed to stop the breach from continuing and replying to authorities. These actions may take a lot of time, meaning that work produced by the business as a whole might drop for a while. In the age of everything being available at all times, this may have a bigger effect on your business success than you think.
Intellectual Property Theft
Finally, the theft of intellectual property can mean that trade secrets, product designs, and more can be leaked. This can cause a business to lose a lot of money, with their information being leaked that others might use for their businesses. Not only this, relationships built over years with partners can be lost overnight meaning future working relationships may no longer be possible.
As you can see, the protection of data is extremely important, with so many detrimental consequences for individuals and businesses. Businesses, organisations, institutions, and individuals must have a competent IT infrastructure to prevent cyber attacks.
To protect your business from data breaches and cyber attacks, you need to ensure you implement a few different secure pathways that will prevent attackers from worming their way into your digital infrastructure.
How can you boost your cyber security?
There are endless ways to improve your business cyber security, but there are some basic measures you can put in place to give you a good foundation. So what would we recommend? Below, we’ve listed a few things to check to make sure your business is safe:
- Firewall Protection – A firewall is a network security device or software that ensures incoming and outgoing traffic is monitored and managed in alignment with security rules. It is a line of defence between the internal network and external networks. Routers have inbuilt firewalls.
- Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware Software – Anti-virus and anti-malware software protect devices from malware infections. Overall, it helps to keep data safe and prevent identity theft, financial fraud, and more. This software should be used with other cyber security methods, such as firewalls.
- Data Encryption – Data encryption protects sensitive information by converting sensitive data into an unreadable format, known as ciphertext. This ensures secure communication across networks, protected data storage, and only authorised access.
- Access Control – Ensure that only authorised personnel are accessing your important IT areas, folders, and files. Use difficult passwords to stay protected, and use cameras to detect intrusion in important areas of your business, e.g., the server room.
Below we’ve highlighted some great products that will help to enhance your cyber security.
Our Product Recommendations to Enhance Your Cyber Security
SonicWall Nsa 6600 Network Security Manager Essential
A multi-tenant centralised firewall manager that allows you to centrally manage all firewall operations error-free by adhering to auditable workflows.
Features:
- Group-based device control and unlimited scale to centrally manage and provision your network security operations.
- Synchronised and enforced security policies across your environments with flexible local controls and monitoring.
- Manage all from a single user-friendly console that can be accessed from any location using any browser-enabled device.
ESET EPA PROTECT Advanced
This protection software includes essential security products to help you build a multilayered security portfolio with one convenient bundle. It combines endpoint security with full disk encryption and cloud sandbox analysis for next-level protection against sophisticated attacks.
Features:
- Improved protection against ransomware and zero-day attacks via sandboxing.
- Increased ease of operations and lower total cost of ownership with cloud-based management.
- Protects company data and helps meet regulatory compliance through advanced data encryption.
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Meraki Go GX20-HW-UK Router Firewall
A powerful router and firewall that keeps devices on the network private and secure, while providing control over network usage limits and website access.Suitable for small businesses.
Features:
- Firewall and router combination.
- Block websites, prioritise bandwidth, and set usage limits across the entire network.
- Cloud managed with the Meraki Go mobile app.
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Ubiquiti UniFi USG Security Gateway
A security appliance designed for businesses and organisations seeking a cost-effective solution to secure and manage their networks.
Features:
- Powerful firewall performance.
- Convenient VLAN support.
- VPN server for secure communications.
- QoS for enterprise VoIP.
Cisco Meraki MX64W-HW
Cisco Meraki MX security appliances are ideal for organisations with large numbers of distributed sites. Protect your business with a stable firewall, Auto VPN self-configuring site-to-site VPN, Identity-based policies, and 3G/4G failover.
Features:
- Layer 7 application firewall
- Content filtering
- Web search filtering
- SNORT-based intrusion prevention
- Web caching
- Intelligent WAN with multiple uplinks and 4G failover
WatchGuard Firebox Cloud (For small, medium, and large businesses)
WatchGuard’s leading Firebox provides unified threat management appliances to public environments. Firebox Cloud can be installed and easily deployed to protect a virtual private cloud from attacks such as botnets, cross-site scripting, SQL injection attempts, and other intrusion vectors. Suitable plans for 1-3 years, with specific options for small, medium, or large businesses.
Features:
- Streamlined UI built for each cloud platform.
- Simplify the process of establishing secure connections to your public cloud environment.
- Detects attacks, and malware, and filters web contents.
To upscale your IT infrastructure with cyber security-enhancing products, go to our website and shop now at Comms Express.
