Dr Gareth Mott

The biggest problem with pen and paper systems is that they don’t scale well, says Gareth Mott, from the Royal United Services Institute. It’s slower than using a computer for many tasks ,and it’s hard or perhaps impossible to coordinate thousands of employees using such methods across multiple office locations. But practising workarounds really can help, adds Dr Mott. He and colleagues have researched how “war-gaming” and IT failure roleplay exercises can impact employees’ responses to real-life cyber-attacks. “We found that the companies that had done that, sometimes a few weeks before they had a live incident, really benefitted,” he says. It’s not just pen and paper that could come in handy. Dr Mott is aware of one firm that bought “crates worth of Chromebooks” for staff in the wake of a cyber-incident, so that they could work without needing access to the company network.

For all the prominence of ransomware and the chaos left in its wake, most conversations around attacks tend to focus on the financial damage. Companies have blamed ransomware for insolvencies, while the global financial cost of ransomware attacks totals hundreds of billions of pounds. But there is another, less frequently discussed cost: the huge emotional and physical toll on the people left dealing with the aftermath of attacks. Two new reports, The Ransomware Victim Experience from defence thinktank RUSI and an accompanying academic article for the Journal of Cybersecurity, outline just how devastating these attacks are to victims’ health and wellbeing.

A cyber expert has shared how Stuxnet damaged an Iranian nuclear plant and if the UK is safe from similar malicious attacks. Dr Gareth Mott, research fellow at the RUSI Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London, said that before 2010 similar attacks might have happened, but in the shadows.