Case Study
UK CHAMBER OF SHIPPING
How Stellarise brought cyber security awareness and Cyber Essentials to an organisation with international influence.
Client
Location: UK
Year founded: 1987
Website: https://www.ukchamberofshipping.com
The UK Chamber of Shipping is the trade association and voice of the UK shipping industry. It works with Government, parliament, international organisations and others to champion and protect the industry on behalf of its members.
As such, the UK Chamber is part of a network of industry influencers and has access to governments and government bodies at the highest level – not just in the UK, but internationally.
Challenge
As with any organisation with connections to the UK Government, the UK Chamber are potentially of heightened interest to foreign threat actors. As well as the need to protect their own data, additional risk lay with hackers attempting to use the UK Chamber as a gateway to attack those organisations they were connected with, which includes the Royal Navy. In this climate, the need for good cyber security was paramount.
Having been subjected to an earlier Cryptolocker attack where hackers attempted to encrypt files with malware, the UK Chamber had worked with Stellarise to quickly recover and restore files from backup with the minimum of fuss. This led to the UK Chamber wanting to raise awareness about cyber security on an organisational level.
“I don’t think you can ever be complacent with cyber security; you just have to keep trying to be up there in terms of best practice. Everyone understands that with threats such as cryptolockers and GDPR compliance, it’s just enormously important.”
Our Solution
Cyber security awareness training with KnowBe4
People are often the weakest link in cyber security and hackers attempt to exploit human error and lack of awareness in order to gain access. As such, training focused on employees is a powerful tool in identifying where any weaknesses may lie, therefore preventing further attacks.
Stellarise offer security awareness training through our partner, KnowBe4. It combines awareness training with simulated scenario-based phishing attacks and so can provide visibility of where or with whom the weaknesses lie so that action can be taken. Stellarise brought this training to the UK Chamber of Shipping.
“Stellarise training really drilled home the importance of preventative behaviours. The fact that we were throwing scenarios at our people, through the training, was enormously important in reinforcing the behaviours that we want. Making our people aware of the issues has been a huge game-changer in terms of our cyber resilience. It’s early days but it really does seem to be paying dividends in terms of staff awareness and being able to talk about the issues.”
Cyber Essentials certification
After Stellarise put in place the necessary steps to gain certification, the UK Chamber achieved Cyber Essentials with independent verification from our partners Risk Crew.
Risk Crew is an elite group of product-independent, information governance, risk, and compliance management professionals and the forerunners in the design and delivery of effective business information and communication technology risk and security solutions. Find out more about their Cyber Essentials services here.
The Results
Having raised of cyber security throughout the organisation with the training from KnowBe4 and attained the Cyber Essentials certification, the UK Chamber are now much more confident about their approach to cyber security now and in the future – as Richard explains:
“Prevention is better than cure – and we’ve proven that we can cure. There’s nothing more confidence building than having had an attack and being able to bounce back with resilience. Stellarise are very good at making sure we get all the security patches and KnowBe4 is very good at the human element and training. We thank Stellarise for making us aware about that – and we are now Cyber Essentials certified too.”
Reflecting on the relationship with Stellarise, Richard had this to say about the support the UK Chamber receives:
“All the things you want to have the confidence that your partner is looking after, Stellarise have it covered. There’s the knowledge, the expertise, the ability to stay up to date with what is going on in the world. We’ve brought our systems up to date to best practice level. There’s the resource to be able to plan some pretty big stuff like the migration to Microsoft 365 which happened very smoothly, the capacity to help with execution. The backup is superb, we can get them on the phone quickly, there’s a real physical footprint in terms of turning up and doing things.”
Technology Stack
