Firms advised to put plans on paper in case of cyber-attack

Firms advised to put plans on paper in case of cyber-attack

The warning comes as the National Cyber-Security Centre (NCSC) reported an increase in more serious cyber attacks this year.

A recent spate of hacks has highlighted the chaos that can ensue when hackers take computer systems down.

The government has written to chief executives across the country strongly recommending that they should have physical copies of their plans at the ready as a precaution.

People should plan for potential cyber-attacks by going back to pen and paper, according to the latest advice.

Criminal hacks on Marks and Spencer, The Co-op and Jaguar Land Rover have led to empty shelves and production lines being halted this year as the companies struggled without their computer systems.

Organisations need to "have a plan for how they would continue to operate without their IT, (and rebuild that IT at pace), were an attack to get through," said Richard Horne, chief executive of the NSCS.

Firms are being urged to look beyond cyber-security controls toward a strategy known as "resilience engineering", which focuses on building systems that can anticipate, absorb, recover, and adapt, in the event of an attack.

Preferably the plans should be in paper form or stored offline, the agency suggests.

Although the total number of hacks that the NCSC dealt with in the first nine months of this year was, at 429, roughly the same as for a similar period last year, there was an increase in hacks with a bigger impact.

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