Mandate fraud takes place when you or an employee is deceived into changing a regular payment mandate (such as a direct debit, standing order or bank transfer), by purporting to be an organisation you make regular payments to such as a supplier, membership or subscription organisation. 

Virtual private networks all perform the same basic service: providing end-to-end encryption for any data sent through them. This encryption does not stop your data from being intercepted … but merely means that the person reading the content of your data is faced with unintelligible text.

The term malware refers to software designed and distributed to gain unauthorised access to computers and other connected devices, disrupt their normal operation, gather sensitive or confidential information or spy on the device’s user(s).

This page covers social media – as in visiting and using the common social networking sites – and the use of social media as a business tool.

It is becoming increasingly common for organisations to be hit by online attacks which render their website unable to service legitimate requests. Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is not a form of hacking, but simply an orchestrated overload of concurrent visitors, swamping your web infrastructure. Such attacks are frequently caused not by many people visiting the […]

Passwords are the most common way for your organisation and the people in it to prove identity when banking, making purchases and other transactional online activities, accessing services, using email and accessing computers themselves (via User Accounts). The use of strong passwords and their secrecy is therefore vital in order to protect the organisation’s and […]

It is vital to manage who has access to which information held by your organisation. This means physically enabling and restricting access to various information, and also having the ability to monitor who is accessing or has accessed what information, and when.

Any organisation making an effort to improve its data security will be more attractive to customers and suppliers, who know that their data will be looked after better with that organisation. As people begin to understand the risks, it will become increasingly important when looking for a supplier or partner that the organisations they deal with […]

The General Data Protection Regulation – more commonly referred to as GDPR – applies to all organisations worldwide that process personal data of European Union (EU) citizens, effectively making it the first global data protection law. Its introduction is based on the fact that many businesses and services operate across borders, making international consistency around […]

Private Branch Exchanges (PBX) are telephone systems used by small and medium businesses for internal and external communications. They are frequently targeted by criminals who exploit the technology by committing what is known as PBX fraud (also known as ‘dial-through fraud’) – where the PBX is hacked into allowing calls to be routed through the […]