NCSC Launches Two New Tools for Small Businesses

The UK’s leading cybersecurity agency has launched two new services designed to help the nation’s small businesses to more effectively enhance their cyber-risk management.

The National Cyber Security Agency (NCSC) today announced a Cyber Action Plan – a questionnaire for small organizations and individuals/families, which delivers a free personalized security to-do list depending on the answers it receives.

The GCHQ-run agency’s second new service is Check Your Cyber Security. Accessible via the action plan, it can be used by non-technical employees to find and fix a small range of security issues in their organization.

A handful of simple online checks are run to identify common vulnerabilities in public-facing IT systems, including web browsers, IP addresses and websites, and email inboxes.

The idea is for the NCSC to help less well-resourced organizations get the security basics right to deter opportunistic cyber-criminals.

Read more on the NCSC’s free tools for businesses: NCSC's Free Email Security Check Spots Domain Issues.

Launched as part of the NCSC’s Cyber Aware campaign, the new services are certainly needed. According to a government report out last year, nearly two-fifths (38%) of small businesses in the UK suffered a “cyber incident” over the previous 12 months.

However, raising awareness is key: that same report revealed that just 30% of businesses are aware of the Cyber Aware campaign and the resources they could be utilizing.

Small businesses, which the government defines as companies with 0–49 employees, comprise over 99% of the country’s estimated 5.5 million companies. They also contribute nearly half (48%) of all employees and around a third (34%) of private sector turnover.

“Small businesses are the backbone of the UK, but we know that cyber-criminals continue to view them as targets. That’s why the NCSC has created the Cyber Action Plan and Check Your Cyber Security to help them boost their online defences in a matter of minutes,” explained NCSC CEO, Lindy Cameron.

“I strongly encourage all small businesses to use these tools today to keep the cyber-criminals out and their operations on track.”