Your guide to Cyber Essentials

Cyber Essentials is a scheme that is backed by the government and the aim is to help businesses to be protected against a range of Cyber Attacks. As you may be aware from recent news, Cyber Criminals target all different types of businesses and most feel they won’t be affected but actually any size business is at risk.

We at Hamilton Group feel that it is very important to have the right infrastructure in place to keep your business safe, and ensure you can pass that confidence to your clients.

There are multiple benefits to getting accreditation, it would fill your potential clients with confidence that you take security seriously and the net positive of that could be gainikng more clients. Cyber Essentials accreditation also, reassures clients that you will keep thgeir data and information safe.

Cyber Essentials accreditation involves going through a self-assessment questionaire abgainst a the most common types of Cyber Attacks. The aim is to ensure that your business can be considered secure enough to cover the basics.

Although it is a questionaire, it definately is not just a tick box exercise. The aim is to check for any vulnerabilities in your setup, even the simplest thing could be a trigger to allow a Cyber Attack through.

The aim is to address and keep your infrastructure protected. Hamilton Group can help you approach the questions and assist with any question that you unfortunately had to answer no to.

Cyber Essentials Plus accreditiation requires the self assessment questionaire as well. However, this is more extensive as once the questions are answered and checked an outsider must verify the answer and ensure that they are correct to ensure competion accuracy.

This accreditation is the highest available of the two and will ensure the confidence and also Cyber Insurance companies are also becoming more interested in this accreditation.

Also, when approaching new business for tender this is becoming a popular question and it is believed in the future could become a requirement for certain industries (may not happen).

There are multiple benefits, check out just a few:

Cyber Essentials looks at different key areas when forming your assessment, to allow you to pass you must complete the following:

A Firewall allows you to limit traffic on both private and public networks, think of it like a barrier between you and the outside world.

As part of the process you are asked on the type of Virus or Malware protection and whether it is kept up to date.

If your answer to this is Windows Defender, then we strongly disagree you should use that.

Regular keeping your Operating System and applications up to date is essential for reducing vulnerabilities in your infrastructure. Cyber Essentials has many questions covering this exact subject.

A system setup incorrectly opens your infrastructure up to huge invulnerabilities. A Cyber Criminal can use social engineering or Ransomware / Malware to cause damage to your business, essentially securiting this is without question the number one requirement.

User access control is essentially whether your user accounts are a standard account or an administrator. Many organisations utilise something called Groups, a group allows permissions to be given based on certain levels or access to specific folders.

For instance a department many have all the members of that deparment such as the Accounts Department or Customer Services.

If anything in this post has spiked interest, if you’d like to discuss getting Cyber Essentials your business then get in touch.

Call us on 01423 438953, fill out our form below or book an appointment.