Cyber Crime Poses Greatest Threat to manufacturing SMEs

With Google and social networking sites the latest targets for cyber crime, manufacturing IT professionals and consumers need to do much more than just improve their user awareness to curb the increasing threat through 2010. Adopting a holistic approach by practicing good PC hygiene and keeping up-to-date with patch and product updates, as well as encouraging SMEs to outsource to more knowledgeable companies, are just the starting points, they said. Philippe Jan, Cyber Security MSc tutor at Lancaster University, says: "The difficulty is that there are many attackers and there are so few of us who work in the security field. We are therefore facing an uphill battle to know everything, from being a competent network system administrator and programmer, to a forensics expert and an educator." And he adds: "We have found that many of the attacks can be traced to internal sources and therefore having an educational and awareness push at user level will hopefully make people more aware of the dangers and make them less likely to be a victim of crime." Meanwhile, Daniel Fenwick, technical director of Zentek Forensics, says: "Employees taking information from an employer is probably the most damaging thing an individual can do. A database or a client base is often the most valuable information a company has." Neil Lathwood, IT director of a UKFast, adds that organisations, such as hardware and software vendors and Internet service providers, have a responsibility to protect the businesses that they service. "We hold a lot of key data for thousands of organisations throughout the UK and they trust us with that information," explains Lathwood. "We therefore have to ensure that our team realise the level of trust that we expect and make sure they receive the correct training and have the systems in place to be able to secure that data and use it on a day-to-day basis."