The Importance of Cyber Essentials Accreditation
For the 2024 to 2025 funding year, Department for Education (DfE) is changing the requirements regarding IT security for colleges and special post-16 institutions (SPIs).
Colleges and SPIs will now be required to achieve cyber essentials during the 2024 to 2025 funding year.
What is Cyber Essentials Certification?
Cyber Essentials is an effective, Government backed scheme that will help you to protect your organisation, whatever its size, against a whole range of the most common and recently highly increasing cyber attacks.
Cyber attacks come in many shapes and sizes, but the vast majority are very basic in nature, carried out by relatively unskilled individuals. They’re the digital equivalent of a thief trying your front door to see if it’s unlocked. Cyber Essentials accreditation helps to prevent these attacks.
There are two levels of certification:
1, Cyber Essentials
Gives you protection against a wide variety of the most common cyber attacks. This is important because vulnerability to basic attacks can mark you out as target for more in-depth unwanted attention from cyber criminals and others.
2. Cyber Essentials Plus
Cyber Essentials Plus still has the Cyber Essentials trademark simplicity of approach, and the protections you need to put in place are the same, but for Cyber Essentials Plus a hands-on technical verification is carried out.
Why Education and Corporate Sectors Need Cyber Essentials?
According to research conducted by Comparitech, a staggering 105 cyber attacks were reported on educational institutions worldwide in 2023, marking a massive 517% increase since 2018 when tracking began.
In the UK specifically, official figures from last year unveiled a distressing surge in attacks on secondary schools, rising from 58% in 2021 to a concerning 70% in 2022, underscoring the vulnerability of the education sector to cyber crime.
The CyberEdge 2022 Cyberthreat Defense Report (CDR) provides a breadth of insight into cyber security in countries all over the world. It found that in the UK, 81.4% of organisations had experienced at least one cyber attack in the year prior to the study, compared to 71.1% in the previous annual findings.
Over a 12-month period, well over half (73%) of UK organisations dealt with a ransomware attack - a 15% rise on the previous year.
The average time to identify a UK data breach is 181 days
Why Confident Cyber Security Posture is Crucial in the Education Sector?
Protecting student data
Student’s online resilience
Maintaining uninterrupted learning
Financial protection
Securing school’s infrastructure
Regulatory compliance to avoid penalties and legal repercussions
How Galtec can help?
Cyber security remains a critical aspect of any organisation. Our security experts are well-positioned to provide assistance and advice around Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus.
Continuous training to help employees stay cyber-aware is indeed massively important. With the increasing sophistication of cyber threats, members of the workforce are often the first line of defence against cyber attacks. Therefore, equipping them with the knowledge and skills to identify and respond to these threats is critical. In today’s digital world, every organisation, no matter size, is a potential target for cyber attackers. Continuous education and awareness around cyber security best practices can significantly reduce the risk and impact of a cyber crime.
“As always, we cannot thank you enough for your help and support. You have been fantastic for both – the CE+ and ISO accreditations. We could not have done this without you.”
Mailoan Nguyen, Head of Customer Operations, White Rose Education
