The term "hacker" gets thrown around in a variety of contexts and in a multitude of different ways nowadays. While it's great that cybersecurity is gaining more and more awareness across the globe, the technical nature of cybersecurity means that terms are often used interchangeably, in different contexts, and sometimes incorrectly.

As legislation goes, the GDPR could be unique in its insistence that a new professional role, the Data Protection Officer (DPO), be created to ensure its mandates are properly met. But getting a DPO in place is no simple recruitment exercise, and that’s especially true for schools. For starters, people with the requisite mix of abilities and experience to do the job in educational environments are hard to find.

As any seasoned cyber security professional will tell you, good security only works when it’s embedded as culture within an organisation – and that must come from the top. But sometimes, the top doesn’t want to know. Even with recent events highlighting the vital importance of cyber security and the average cost of a breach reaching an eye-watering £3 million, many organisations still struggle to get security on the boardroom agenda.

Working remotely has its own personal challenges in terms of productivity: between the cat walking across your keyboard and the kids dropping in on your Zoom meetings, workers across the globe have had to adjust to doing their job in a different way. Organisations also had to swiftly transition to employees working remotely, and this has introduced a new set of risks from a cyber security perspective.

Since the outbreak of Covid-19, many organisations have had to make a swift transition to remote working to ensure business continuity. What would typically take months of planning and preparation was implemented in a matter of days. The chaos that this created, combined with the already uncertain nature of life during a pandemic, had created the ideal environment for cybercriminals.

GDPR recently breezed past its second birthday and, like many two-year-olds, continues to cause concern and confusion for those who have to deal with it. Unlike real two-year-olds, however, GDPR is quite clear in what it demands and there could be big consequences if they are not met. For businesses, failure to meet GDPR’s requirements represents an increased risk of data breaches and the reputational damage and legal repercussions that breaches inevitably lead to.

EasyJet, CapitalOne, British Airways and Marriott are all huge companies with equally large budgets. Another thing they have in common is they all fell victim to a serious data breach, costing them hundreds of millions of pounds. If the major players with a lot of resources to devote to cyber security still get hacked, do SMEs with limited budgets stand a chance? It’s a dramatic question, so let’s explore the answer.

In 2018, the world’s trust was shaken. That year, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had furtively harvested data left exposed by Facebook. The information of over 87 million individuals was exploited to assemble voter profiles and customise the distribution of political advertisements in the run up to the 2016 US Presidential Election as well as Brexit.

Covid-19 is causing myriad challenges for businesses, with remote working, diverted priorities and a general scramble to maintain business-as-usual operations. This is unprecedented in UK industry, and presents a range of challenges and opportunities. In particular, hackers now have more time on their nefarious hands and a whole host of new targets in front of them, in the form of a large number of working-from-home employees.

Many organisations are acting to prevent the spread of Coronavirus by allowing their employees to work from home. In order to be able to do so comfortably, and without introducing a component of risk, businesses should follow certain best practices that can guarantee their digital assets are just as secure with a remote workforce as they would be in-house. Unfortunately, cybercriminals have already started to take advantage of this pandemic.