UK CNI At Risk To Major Cyber Attack With Emergency Services High On The List

In the latest UK Threat Landscape report, the UK’s emergency services have been found to be at risk of a major cyber-attack. The report by Anomali evaluates the UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) against threats and possible vulnerabilities and general weak spots which could be exploited by attackers.The emergency services, more specifically the healthcare services, have suffered from well publicised cyber attacks. Paul Norris, Senior Systems Engineer – EMEA at Tripwire commented below.

Paul Norris, Senior Systems Engineer – EMEA at Tripwire:

“Critical National infrastructures (CNI), whether small or large, need to be aware of the threats they face from a cyber attack. Whether part of a small hospital system or a large energy plant, the data these organizations have is valuable to criminals. Security vendors understand this and are investing in the necessary technology to keep CNI systems secure. All CNI services should take the time to review not only their tools and processes for defense, but also their incident response plans. The worst time to evaluate this is during an attack. Many successful breaches have been attributed to organizations failing to patch or mitigate known vulnerabilities so keeping on top of them is crucial. As other industries have ramped up security due to increased breach activity, attackers are migrating to less protected targets. Therefore, it is vital that all devices are on current operating systems, which are continuously being updated and insuring that the latest security patches are installed. This might not be exciting, but it’s proven to reduce the number of successful attacks.”