Cyber Essentials Scheme – We are certified

I am pleased to confirm that we are now certified as compliant with the requirements of the Cyber Essentials Scheme.

Cyber Essentials Scheme: overview

The Government worked with the Information Assurance for Small and Medium Enterprises (IASME) consortium and the Information Security Forum (ISF) to develop Cyber Essentials.

Cyber Essentials is a set of basic technical controls to help organisations protect themselves against common online security threats.

The full scheme, launched on 5 June 2014. It is backed by industry including the Federation of Small Businesses, the CBI and a number of insurance organisations which are offering incentives for businesses.

The Cyber Essentials scheme addresses the most common Internet-based threats to cyber security — particularly, attacks that use widely available tools and demand little skill. The scheme considers these threats to be:

• hacking — exploiting known vulnerabilities in Internet-connected devices, using widely available tools and techniques
• phishing — and other ways of tricking users into installing or executing a malicious application
• password guessing — manual or automated attempts to log on from the Internet, by guessing passwords

The Cyber Essentials scheme helps organisations to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data stored on devices which connect to the Internet.

Advantages of certification

Certification and compliance provides reassurance to customers that we are working to secure our IT and their data against cyber attack

It shows that we take cyber security seriously.

Trusted IT supplier

We don’t claim to be IT experts ourselves. Our IT is very important to how we deliver our service. For this reason we have a trusted IT supplier in the form of Alchemy Systems.

Alchemy Systems have been assisting us over the last 4 years. Because Legal Services IT support is one of their specialisms, they have been able to give us outstanding and pro-active support. Thanks to all at Alchemy.