With criminals using ever increasing sophisticated and elaborate methods to exploit any weakness in a company’s security system, CITS has collated specialist booklets and guidance documents produced by specialist organisations such as the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), London’s Metropolitan Police, etc, which you can download for free.

You may wish to circulate them to all interested parties within your organisation.

By getting your colleagues and staff members to adopt and adhere to these documents, will help minimise the risk of you, your colleagues or your business becoming a victim to this type of crime.

The National Cyber Security Centre’s new website reporting tool allows people to send them a link from websites which they think are trying to scam the public, regardless of how they got to the site.

The NCSC – which is a part of GCHQ – then analyses the site, and if found to be malicious a notice may be issued to the hosting provider for the site to be removed, preventing members of the public falling victim in future.

The NCSC has previously highlighted the problem of scam websites, including fake news pages where celebrities such as Sir Richard Branson appear to be endorsing investment schemes. Links to these pages were subsequently removed by the NCSC.

The website reporting tool is the latest way in which the public can help the NCSC counter online scams. Last year, the NCSC created the pioneering Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS) where the public can forward suspected scam emails to report@phishing.gov.uk

If the emails are found to contain links to malicious websites, they will then be taken down by the service, which has received more than 6.5million reports of malicious emails and resulted in the takedown of 50,500 online scams since its launch in April 2020.

There are 9 Cyber Resilience Centres that cover every region of England and Wales. The Cyber Resilience Centre are a Policing Prevent initiative, which headed by a Police Officer and are a not for profit organisation, the centres work with micro, small, medium sized businesses and organisations to look at their current cyber posture and help support making the organisation more secure. Membership of the CRC’s are FREE and organisations get access to a 121 meeting with a police cyber professional to discuss their current cyber security, members will receive 16 emails over the course of a year providing simple advice on how to make your organisation safer, as well as access to webinars, and newsletters.

The CRC’s also provide subsidised paid for services. There are 9 services in total. And these services range from staff awareness training to first step web assessments to remote vulnerability assessments. These services are delivered by second and third year students, in a cyber related degree, who have been successful in applying for a place on the National Cyber crime Programme in Policing. The students are supervised by a cyber security expert. This programme gives the students real world experience, and from the organisation’s perspective it provides an affordable but accessible quality service, to support these organisations on their cyber journey.

To find the Cyber Resilient centre that covers your area please use the postcode lookup on the NCRCG website: Regional Centres - National CRC Group