Research released this week by the Government’s Cyber Aware campaign has shown that levels of cyber security awareness are still shockingly low in the UK, particularly among younger people.
Two years ago, we carried out a similar piece of research and it’s worrying to see that attitudes towards cyber safety don’t seem to have progressed in the intervening years. In fact, the situation appears to be getting worse. For example, according to the new research 52% of 18 – 25 year olds use the same password for multiple online services – two years ago, 23% of respondents to our survey admitted to the same thing.
The big concern for businesses is that this apparent lack of cyber security awareness carries over from personal life to work. Our research showed that 17 per cent of people write down their passwords, 16 per cent work while connected to public Wi-Fi networks and 15 per cent access social media sites on their work PCs. Such bad habits and a lack of awareness about security mean that employees are inadvertently leaving companies’ cyber doors wide open to attack.
Combine that internal threat to cyber security with the fact that nearly half of all businesses (46%) have reported a cyber breach or attack in the past 12 months1 and it’s no surprise that cyber security experts are still very much in demand. In fact, they are expected to see the highest salary increases among IT professionals this year.
To help you understand the scale of the cyber security issue, and to provide you with practical ways of managing the risk, we combined insights from 15 cyber security experts in a report which you can download free here.
If you are considering taking on a cyber security expert, please get in touch with us to discuss your recruitment requirements.
1Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2017, Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport
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