Easyjet’s Cyber Attack – what should you do?

Cyber Attacks

The hackers are at it again with their cyber attack armour on!  It seems that during the COVID-19 pandemic they are keeping busy with finding new ways to carry out cyber attacks.  EasyJet is the latest to suffer an attack and have issued their formal announcement with the bad news.

We’ve probably all at some time in the past had someone try to use our bank cards; you get that scary call from the banking fraud team and wonder how much it’s going to cost you!  Or you go to pay for that new shiny item only to have your card embarrassingly declined. Or, or, or – one way or another it’s happened to us or we know someone it’s happened to. 

On a personal level, it feels like you’ve had a burglary, a complete invasion of privacy.  On a corporate level, it can be the difference between business as usual and the end of the line with money transfer scams being so sophisticated that they can replicate our current suppliers and trick the best of us.  Nasty stuff but they’re out there and we need to protect ourselves. 

In this post, we provide the statistics and steps that can help to protect you and your business/employer.

Cyber Attack Statistics

The UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey updated on 20^th March 2020 reveals:

“Almost half of businesses (46%) and a quarter of charities (26%) report having cybersecurity breaches or attacks in the last 12 months. Like previous years, this is higher among medium businesses (68%), large businesses (75%) and high-income charities (57%)”

According to CompTIA’s study employee error accounts for 52% of these breaches – not intentionally of course but weak passwords and a failure to identify phishing attacks are common problems.  Alarming figures!

What Happened

It seems that EasyJet became aware of the breach in January of this year and have been investigating internally.  According to the BBC EasyJet “did not provide details about the nature of the attack or the motives, but said its investigation suggested hackers were targeting “company intellectual property” rather than information that could be used in identity theft.

What can you do?

Keeping one step ahead of the hacker’s mindset will help to keep you safe.  The ICO (Information Commissioners Office) has provided information on steps you can take to minimise an attack. Have a good read through as a minimum.

Other steps to take include:

• Change your password immediately – we’d always recommend using different passwords for every login. If you’ve used the same password on EasyJet and other accounts then you should change your password everywhere.
• Implement 2-Factor Authentication on all your systems (2FA)
• Consider using a free password value such as Lastpass to create and save random, strong emails
• Reach out to us for free cybersecurity training solutions
• Check out https://haveibeenpwned.com/ to check if your email account has appeared in any other data breaches
• If you think you’ve been subject to a phishing attack, then report it to the Government’s National Cyber Security Centre

What can we do to help you?

• Provide Cyber Security training solutions
• Provide Enterprise Grade MFA security
• Get your business Cyber Essentials Certified
• Undertake a security audit to baseline your current risk
• Integrated Advanced Threat Protection against zero-hour threats via sandboxing technology

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