iESE has teamed up with UK Government-certified cyber security and awareness training provider OSP Cyber Academy to provide the Cyber Centre of Excellence (CCoE) with access to training programmes for officers and members delivering local public services.
Councils in the UK are dealing with thousands of attempted cyber-attacks every day, with 2.3 million attacks being detected in 2022. Cyber-criminals are increasingly targeting UK councils, with more than two million attempted attacks recorded in 2022 and there has been a 14% rise in the number of cyber-attacks year-on-year.
Public authorities are a real target. Cyber attackers are looking to be disruptive and to cause chaos and if you consider the public sector now in the digital world, we have councils, schools and other public organisations and this means;
- People accessing more services online
- Employees working more flexibly
- Employees connecting to systems from different locations
- More data sharing with partners
It is key that public sector employees know what they can do to help their organisation remain secure, especially as they are providing services for some of the most vulnerable people in society. Some councils have undertaken some form of basic cyber awareness training, but a significant amount have not. The CCoE are now able to improve this area for local public services, but this does require commitment of leadership to support training and awareness, through different methods and on an ongoing basis.
OSP Cyber Academy’s Cyber/Information Security and Data Protection training, which is National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) assured, will offer online and in-person training to councils, police services, fire and rescue services, GPs and the NHS. Training days, such as the company’s Cyber Risk & Resilience Board & Executive Awareness Course, will be offered in-person to local authority senior management teams. An online learning portal will also be made available for member organisations which will allow the wider employee population to access various online courses such as OSP’s GDPR Staff Awareness Course, Cyber Security Staff Awareness Course, Phishing and Social Engineering Course and Mobile Device Security Course and the newly developed Supply Chain Cyber Awareness Course.
Utilising access to these courses will enable public sector organisations to reduce risk, improve cyber resilience and demonstrate compliance with legal requirements and be assured that the training is to the highest standard.
In Verizon’s 2022 Data Breaches Investigations Report it showed that 82% of data breaches involve a human element. These incidents ranged from employees exposing information directly such as misconfiguring a database, to indirectly making an error that enables cybercriminals to access the organisation’s systems. The human element continues to play a very large role in incidents and breaches which makes training people and raising awareness of their actions even more pivotal.
To find out more about the OSP Cyber Academy offering, please click on the button below.
