Travo Cyber Summit: Lack of compliance with basic measures behind most attacks

Former Flying Squad chief and now chief executive of the Global Cyber Alliance Terry Wilson urged all attempted attacks to be reported to help protect the UK from criminals

Putting the basic in place is essential to protect a business against cyber attacks but failure of compliance is the main cause of a breach.

Former head of the Metropolitan Police’s e-crime unit Terry Wilson, global partnerships director at the Global Cyber Alliance and also a founding member of the Ransomware Taskforce, addressed the Travolution Cyber Summit last week.

He said of the 5,000 attacks the Taskforce tracks per month 87% of the successful ones are “all down to non-compliance” with measures that have already been put in place.

“Compliance is extremely important. There’s no point putting the basics in place if you don’t comply with them,” he said.

Wilson urged firms to promote their cyber safety or protection rather than security because it conjures up a vision of a person in uniform standing guard of servers.

He said firms should market the positive that they are taking their customers’ safety seriously and the steps they are taking to value their data as much as their customer.

“I know which organisation I’d be going with, that organisation that takes care and proper care of its customers,” he said.

Any companies that need to report an attack were encouraged to use a special emergency number in the UK - 159 for cybercrime, which was launched last April.

This has been set up by the GCA in collaboration with UK banks and Stop Scams to put people in direct touch with the financial sector. Once a month these reports are collated and the information goes directly to Action Fraud.

Wilson said it is important to report an incident because, like with terrorism, individual pieces of information can lead to the prevention of attacks.

“The National Cyber Security Centre are getting millions of people referring phishing emails to their portal and they are actually analysing them.

“And I can tell you the information they getting from that is absolutely vital in protecting the UK from cyber attacks. I would encourage you all to just forward any phishing emails to NCSC.”