Cornwall Partners in Care News

The current situation in Ukraine is at the centre of our thoughts, and the increasing use of sanctions against Russia is causing concerns amongst data security professionals that they may retaliate with cyber attacks against UK infrastructure and businesses.

You may think that no foreign power would target your particular business, but since the pandemic we are far more integrated digitially with health systems and the NHS would be a likely target.  A cyber attack against the health service has the potential to spread to systems within Adult Social Care. It is also very easy to pick up viruses and malware just by visiting websites.

Just think for a moment what this would mean if you lost all the data on your service users, or none of your computers wanted to work!

So, what can you do?

There are several simple steps you can take to help secure your computer systems

• Make sure anti-virus/malware software is up to date and running on all computers and mobile devices connected to the internet
• Change passwords to something more complicated (mix of characters/words /symbols or a series of random words)
• Use the Data Security Protection Toolkit (DSPT) to assess your cyber security arrangements (free advice and support on this can be found here [Insert your local BSBC details])
• Make sure your business continuity plan includes what to do in a major IT failure
• Make sure all data is backed up daily
• Report any cyber incidents. (Contact the National Cyber Security Centre via ncsc.gov.uk.)

Hopefully by carrying out these simple steps it can go some way towards protecting your business against potential attacks