In March 2018 Travelex managed to leak around 17,000 people’s data. These unfortunate data subjects were all Tesco Bank customers; the data leaked included full names, dates of birth, addresses, phone numbers and partial payment-card information. According to Which? Travelex claimed that it had ruled out a cyber-attack as the cause of this…
Fast forward nearly two years and Travelex is in trouble again. This time Travelex is claiming that no personal data is at risk and that the entire event is down to a virus… Meanwhile the only services that the company is able to offer are manual transactions at its branches: all online services are down including all dependant services such as those offered by Tesco Bank.
Perhaps I am being too hard on Travelex here as no system is completely 100% safe (and you should never trust anyone who tries to sell you such snake oil!) However, I can’t help but wonder what the company had put in place to prevent such malicious actions from being taken against it. What measures have been taken to harden its systems against this sort of thing? Have the members of staff all been trained about Cyber Security?
Every organisation, large or small, has various different layers of protection which can be applied. With every layer, the organisation becomes a little bit safer (or at least it should do, but this is where the skills of cyber security professionals are of great value – preventing organisations from wasting time and money on unnecessary “solutions”). For the average small to medium organisation, I would recommend the following five services as a good combination:
1. Cybersmart – the easy way to get Cyber Essentials (which is a minimum safety standard from the UK Government);
2. Heimdal Security – a suite of security software which has many features to keep users out of harm’s way;
3. Redstor offsite backup – keep your data safe with this automated backup solution;
4. The Email Laundry – Have your organisation’s email filtered before it gets to your users;
5. KnowBe4 – Train your staff about how to spot many security issues. Given that most cyber attacks start with human error, this is not to be taken lightly.
If you want to avoid becoming another Cyber Crime statistic like Travelex, then please email partnersupport@brigantia.com or call Brigantia on 020 3358 0090 to be put in touch with your local specialist.
