Building Resilience: Basics and Best Practices Reinforced

While high-level policy and statistics set the stage, the conference also drilled down into practical measures organisations should take to boost cyber resilience. A lot of this wasn’t flashy new tech, but rather reinforcing known best practices. A few stood out:

Cyber Essentials (CE) as a Baseline

Cyber Essentials, the government-backed basic security certification, got significant attention. The recent government letter to CEOs explicitly calls Cyber Essentials “the minimum cyber security standard” businesses should achieve. Organisations with CE certification are 92% less likely to make a cyber insurance claim. That’s a compelling statistic to share with any business owner questioning the value of baseline controls.

Shockingly, only about 14% of UK businesses currently assess their suppliers’ cyber risks, and an even smaller fraction ensure those suppliers have CE. That’s a gap that needs closing. The advice was clear: if you haven’t achieved Cyber Essentials, do it now and encourage your partners to do the same.

At CyberLab, we’ve long advocated Cyber Essentials, through maintaining our own certification and help clients get theirs. It was validating to hear that CE is still seen by industry leaders and policymakers as a crucial foundation. 

NCSC Early Warning Service

Another very actionable takeaway: sign up for threat alerts. The NCSC’s Early Warning service was highlighted as a no-brainer.

It’s a free tool where NCSC will notify your organisation if they detect possible signs of compromise or known threats targeting you. This might include spotting your IP or domain in threat feeds, etc.

In essence, it taps into the government’s visibility to give you a heads-up, potentially before you notice an attack yourself. The recommendation was that both we and our suppliers enrol in this service.

At CyberLab, we are ensuring all our systems are enrolled in Early Warning so we can react swiftly to any tip-offs. We’ll also be assisting our clients to get onboarded to Early Warning as part of our managed security services. It’s an easy win for improving detection capabilities.

Supply Chain Security is Crucial

Modern businesses don’t operate in isolation; their resilience is only as strong as that of their supply chain.

A recurring point was that big companies and critical sectors often have hundreds of suppliers, contractors, and service providers, and attackers know this. Targeting weaker links in the chain (an IT vendor, a third-party data processor, etc.) is a common tactic to compromise larger targets.

We’ve all seen the headlines – big companies losing millions because of supply chain.

Organisations need to ensure their supply chain is taking cyber security seriously too.

The bottom line: trust needs to be earned and verified when it comes to partners handling your data or systems.

Proactively manage your third-party risk, monitor vendor posture, and strengthen your supply chain security with HackRisk’s Supply Chain Security tools.

Practice Makes Perfect: Incident Drills at Board Level

Perhaps one of the most resonant pieces of advice: prepare for the worst, in advance.

Organisations that plan and rehearse their response to a major cyber incident fare far better when one strikes.

Table-top exercises (TTXs) and simulated breaches for the executive team were cited as essential. If the first time your leadership discusses how to handle a ransomware attack is when you’re in the middle of one, you’re already in trouble.

The conference hammered home that business continuity and disaster recovery plans must include cyber scenarios, and these should be walked through regularly at the highest levels.

As the government letter put it: “not all cyber attacks can be prevented… please plan and exercise how you would continue operations and rebuild following a destructive cyber incident”

This struck a chord with me. We at CyberLab conduct periodic incident response drills internally, but there’s always room to up our game. I’ll be ensuring our senior leadership and technical teams schedule a high-intensity cyber crisis exercise in the coming weeks, to test our readiness against, say, a coordinated ransomware outbreak.