The Heightened Cyber Threat Landscape
Cyber threats are constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated, posing a serious risk to organisations of all sizes and industries. According to official statistics reported by the UK government in 2024, UK businesses have experienced approximately 7.78 million cyber crimes of any type. The UK was the second most targeted country in the world for cyber-attacks, after the US, and cyber crime costs UK businesses an estimated £21 billion per year.
Some of the most prevalent cyber threats that businesses face today include:
• Phishing: A type of social engineering attack that uses fraudulent emails, websites, or messages to trick the recipient into revealing sensitive information, such as passwords, credit card numbers, or bank account details. Phishing can lead to identity theft, fraud, and unauthorised access to business systems and data.
• Ransomware: A type of malware that encrypts the victim's data and demands a ransom for its decryption. Ransomware can cause significant disruption, data loss, and financial damage to businesses. This is now generally executed once an attacker has understood your environment, data, and people to add further concern to you about the information they have about your organisation. This makes it more likely that you’ll pay their ransom demands.
• Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks: A type of attack that floods a website or server with a large amount of traffic, overwhelming its resources and preventing legitimate users from accessing it. DDoS attacks can cause downtime, lost revenue, and reputational damage to businesses.
It’s important to understand that any organisation is at risk of becoming a victim of a cyber attack; it does not matter how big or how small your organisation is.
The Importance of Endpoint Management and Security
Endpoints are the devices that connect to a business network, such as laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Endpoints are often the weakest link in the security chain, as they can be easily compromised, lost, stolen, or misused by malicious actors or careless users. Therefore, endpoint management and security are essential for protecting a business from cyber threats.
Endpoint management is the process of monitoring, managing, and maintaining the endpoints on a network, ensuring that they are compliant with security policies, updated with the latest patches and software, and configured with the appropriate settings and permissions. It can help businesses improve their operational efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance user productivity and satisfaction.
Endpoint security is the process of protecting the endpoints on a network from cyber threats, using various tools and techniques, such as EDR (Endpoint, Detect, Response), firewall, encryption, authentication, and behavioural analysis. Endpoint security can help businesses prevent, detect, and respond to cyber attacks, minimising the impact and damage they can cause.
By implementing effective endpoint management and security solutions, businesses can achieve the following benefits:
• Reduce the risk of data breaches and cyber attacks, and comply with regulatory and industry standards.
• Improve the performance, reliability, and availability of the endpoints, and reduce the need for manual intervention and troubleshooting.
• Enhance the visibility and control over the endpoints, and enforce consistent and granular security policies across the network.
• Empower the users to work securely and productively from anywhere, using any device, and accessing any application.
Contact us today to find out how we can help protect your organisation against cyber threats.
