UK businesses urged to conduct cyber “health checks” by security agencies

The directors of domestic security agency MI5 and intelligence agency GCHQ have written to the chairs of FTSE 350 companies as part of a new initiative to raise corporate awareness of cyber crime, according to the Financial Times.

Company chairs and audit committee heads will be asked to complete a questionnaire with questions on how they protect company intellectual property and customer data, the FT said. The results of this questionnaire will then be aggregated anonymously to allow companies to see how they rank compared to their peers. Auditors will be contacted to discuss areas in which a company may be particularly vulnerable under a proposed second stage of the initiative, according to the FT.

The new initiative follows the publication earlier this week of research showing that every company listed on the FTSE 350 was “leaking” the sort of data that could be used by attackers to gain access to their systems and control of their intellectual property. On Tuesday, homeware retailer Lakeland informed its customers that it was resetting their passwords after hackers gained access to two of its databases, according to a statement on its website.

Source: Out-Law.Com