Five ways to boost your charity’s cyber security in 2022

A small business or charity gets hacked every 19 seconds in the UK, according to Hiscox, and about 88% of all UK organisations suffered at least one security breach in the last 12 months.

 

These are chilling statistics, so what can your charity do to reduce the likelihood of falling victim to cyber criminals? The answer is simple: whatever cyber security precautions you are taking now, you could always do more to keep hackers at bay.

 

The good news is that security improvements needn’t cost the earth. Here are five simple things you can do that will significantly improve your charity’s defences against cyber criminals.

 

 

Treat security as an investment, not a problem

 

This may sound like a buzz phrase, but it’s actually sound advice. A cyber breach would likely be very expensive for your charity, so investing in security measures could save you a great deal of money.

 

That means it’s important to consider whether you are spending enough on cyber security measures, and how your security budget can best be allocated to have maximum impact – and therefore the biggest return on your cyber security investment.

 

 

Identify and protect your charity’s “crown jewels”

 

Your charity doubtless stores large amounts of data of different types, and some if it is more valuable to you (or more damaging to you if it is stolen) than other bits. Equally, some of your charity’s activities are more valuable than others (or more damaging to you if they can’t be carried out).

 

These are your charity’s crown jewels, and it is these that should be the focus of your attention when you consider the cyber security measures you should be taking.

 

When it comes to protecting your most valuable data, it may be appropriate to implement encryption, or to store it in secure storage systems – possibly located in the cloud.

 

Other possible measures include implementing an access management system to restrict the number of stuff members that can access data from your charity’s computer network, and ensuring that only those who need access to particular types of data can in fact access it.

 

 

Deal with you biggest weakness

 

Phishing is used in at least one third of all cyber attacks, according to Security Intelligence, and perhaps as many as one half. That means that beefing up your defences against phishing attacks will make your charity very much more secure from cyber attacks.

 

There are two ways to do this in practice.

 

The first is to ensure that your staff receive regular phishing awareness training to help them to spot fraudulent messages and understand the dangers of clicking on links or opening attachments that they are not expecting,

 

The second way is to run a simulated phishing program such as PhishMe, which involve sending harmless phishing emails to staff members to see who correctly identifies them and who clicks on the links they contain.

 

These sorts of programs raise awareness in phishing emails, and also allow your charity to provide more training to those who fail to identify the simulated phishing emails regularly.