Surge in cybercrime across Merseyside

There has been a surge in the number of businesses across Merseyside who've been the victim of a cyber attack, new research suggests.

Make UK, a British manufacturing organisation found half of all manufacturing firms have been the victim of cybercrime during the last year after thousands of organisations moved their staff to remote working because of the Covid crisis.

Make UK said cybercriminals have been exploiting the emergency working measures, mounting attacks that have come at a "massive cost'' to businesses.

One in four companies has reported losses of up to £25,000 for each cyber breach and 6% lost at least £100,000, said the manufacturers' organisation.

Richard Forrest is a cybercrime expert from Warrington legal firm Hayes Connor Solicitors.

He said the picture is likely to have been reflected across our region:

"We've been really busy over the past 12 months, and we ourselves actually commissioned a survey at the back end of last year, to look at what the impacts of the pandemic, on cybersecurity and data breaches generally was."

"We found some quite useful things. Two in five workers or 40% of people who were asked said that their company had been impacted by a breach."

"It's hard to fully defend against it nowadays, but you can seek advice from an expert on what they would class as the industry standard for what you're operating in."

"Ultimately that's probably what you'll be judged by if do suffer an attack, the question will be okay, well, what measures did you have in place?"

"You probably hear about the big stuff in the news like the British Airways and Ticketmaster because they're household names."

"We get lots of smaller-scale cyber-attacks that you've never heard of and it can really fall on both those ends of the spectrum."

Richard and his team help people to claim against their employers if they've been compromised by an attack. He continued:

"Even if it's what you might think is basic data, e.g. name, address, email address, maybe telephone number, that in itself might not be enough to cause a direct attack but that can lead to the real damage."

"That might then lead to a call or a phishing email where they can lose their data."

"People tend to worry that if you're trying to apply for a mortgage, they worry about the impact on their credit score or that kind of thing, it's that kind of stuff that's not really thought about."

Richard added that the impact on a company that suffers a cyber attack can be very wide-ranging:

"Let's say, for example, the workers who work for that businesses details have been hacked."

"They've then got a valid claim against their employees, potentially for the exposure of data."

"In respect to the businesses commercial side, such as supplier details, financial details, etc... that's going to be the biggest impact on the business, losing the trust from suppliers and people who use them."

Dave Marriott is the technical director at e2e Technologies, a cybersecurity firm on the Wirral he said:

"We've seen businesses close down on a Monday fully working and they come in on Tuesday and haven't been able to operate for two weeks."

"There's one company we've worked with that has been down since the beginning of March and they still haven't got up and running."

"It is absolutely terrifying how much damage these people can do and the speed at which they can do it."

"If your attacker is particularly vile, and they've broken in and stolen all of the records if they then leak your data, well, of course now you're in the hands of the Information Commissioner's Office."

"That could mean you could face somewhere in the region of £20 million or 4% of your turnover, whichever is higher."

"I do genuinely think that you are more at risk working from home than you will be in the office from an attack."

"Casual conversation, where you sort of see an email come through and you immediately turn around to John on your left and say 'hey look at this email?! - That doesn't happen."

"You just get an email and you go 'what's this?' and you click on it and that can be detrimental."

"I think now more now than ever common sense has to play a very, very big part in all of this."

"For example, one of my customers has a rule on their email platform that says if the email originated from outside of that email platform, there's a great big red notice across the top that says this email originated from an external source, please make sure you trust it before you open any attachments"

"So there are things employers can do but also I think people working from home now do have to take more responsibility for it, because it's a lot easier to become a damaging member of staff when you don't have somebody looking over your shoulder all the time."

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