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Following a spate of major attacks, retailers have suffered a serious dent in their revenues, their operations and supplies of produce have been thrust to a standstill, while swathes of confidential customer and employee data has been leaked on the dark web, causing significant wide-scale damage today, and potentially in the future. 

Each of these incidents have underscored the real, tangible effects of digital attacks. Cyber incidents may start in the digital realm, but their impacts are profoundly physical, hitting stock levels, share price, customer experiences, reputations and turnover.  

Cyber threats expanded beyond their digital boundaries long ago, but outside the cyber security industry, many organisations are only beginning to realise this now. Often only learning the hard way.

But given the harsh consequences organisations are facing at the hands of the maliciously-minded, prioritising cyber resilience has never been more important.

The UK Government’s Cyber Breaches Survey 2025

In April this year, the UK government released its annual Cyber Security Breaches Survey, which examined the cyber security practices of organisations in the region and tracked overall attack activity. 

The report found that 43 percent of businesses had experienced a cyber breach or attack in 2024. Phishing remained the most prevalent threat, impacting 85 percent of organisations. Alarmingly, ransomware attacks doubled, with an estimated 19,000 businesses being targeted with the threat.

Ransomware is undeniably today’s most dangerous attack vector, responsible for most of the largest breaches organisations face. This underscores the importance of preparing for attacks, prioritising technical defences and implementing incident response plans. However, the Cyber Breaches survey also highlighted significant gaps in organisational defences, which could be leaving many businesses vulnerable. 

When asked about the technical measures organisations employ to protect their environments, only 19 percent had provided staff security training in the past year, while only 29 percent had undertaken a cyber security risk assessment. 

The survey also found that only 15 percent had taken steps to monitor risks from suppliers or their wider supply chain, only 32 percent had a policy to apply vulnerability patches within 14 days and only 12 percent had adopted penetration testing. 

These findings indicate that while some organisations are adopting measures to protect their environments, the overall majority are still leaving themselves exposed to attacks. 

The survey also revealed that only 23 percent of businesses had a formal incident response plan in place, suggesting that most organisations would struggle to respond to an attack successfully, safeguard recovery efforts and guarantee a swift and effective resumption of their services. 

Cyber Starts at the Top

Given the media attention surrounding cyber crime, it’s clear that it should be a priority for every board, CEO and business department. It should feature prominently on every board and business leader agenda. 

However, the figures from the Cyber Breaches survey show that this isn’t yet the reality. 

Only 27 percent of organisations cited board-level responsibility for cyber security, a significant drop from the 38 percent cited in the 2021 Cyber Security Breaches survey. 

This highlights that awareness remains a major issue. If boards aren’t actively claiming responsibility for cyber security, how can organisations ever truly prioritise resilience? 

Security should come from the top down, and boards and business leaders must understand that it is far from just a technical problem.

Cyber attacks cause massive financial losses, turning them into a business-wide, solvency-issue, which impacts every employee, stakeholder, shareholder and customer.

The Meaning in the Metrics

The Cyber Security Breaches Survey clearly shows that UK organisations have a long way to go to improve their cyber resilience and many businesses are leaving themselves exposed to serious attacks. 

Organisations must remove themselves from the false sense of insignificance and understand that threat actors don’t just target large organisations, they prey on vulnerable ones. 

Organisations must therefore use the findings from the study as a catalyst to improve their defences. 

With phishing still being the biggest driver behind most breaches, we must ask ourselves why this continues to happen. 

Phishing is not a new threat, it’s been around since the mid-nineties, but it continues to cause significant disruption. This raises the question: why do the same threats continue to wreak havoc year after year, despite being well-known for so long?

Awareness is clearly essential, and employees must be taught to question the authenticity of emails and phone calls. But this is a message that must come from the top down. No CEO or business leader can overlook defences, it is their role to drive the business successfully, but no business’s future can ever be certain when cyber is overlooked. Advances in AI are already driving up more convincing phishing scams, so it is essential organisations get ahead of this new wave of attacks.

Organisations must also proactively hunt for threats, prioritise vulnerability management and run asset inventories to ensure there are no blind spots within their networks that could leave them exposed.

Although phishing may be the initial point of compromise for many attacks, criminals often pair this with other vulnerabilities to gain deeper, often unmonitored, access to networks or to carry out ransomware attacks. 

This means employee training, patching known CVEs and conducting proactive penetration testing to uncover hidden weaknesses, whether digital or human, are essential. 

Cyber security should be a layered strategy. 

No single security solution can provide complete resilience, but by layering measures across organisational environments, businesses can stop attackers in their tracks and prevent large-scale breaches that cost millions and disrupt operations. 

Furthermore, running cyber incident response planning, where plans don’t just sit on shelves gathering dust, but are continually monitored, updated and rehearsed, ensures organisations have pre-agreed strategies to help them respond, mitigate and recover quickly from cyber incidents. 

If the Cyber Breaches Survey has taught us anything, it’s that UK businesses are still far from where they need to be. 

They must learn from the recent attacks on retailers, take note of the losses that have already unfolded and use the incidents as a driver to improve their defences.

Focusing on a layered approach to security will help achieve the greatest resilience.

Defences should cover every base, from employee training and asset inventories to proactive threat hunting, patching and penetration testing. 

Attackers won’t stop, our defences mustn’t either. 

Author: 

William Wright, Chief Executive Officer at Closed Door Security