So today I'm here with jasmine, one of our cybersecurity consultants. And she's going to talk us through the Foreign Office hack that happened last week. And that broke the news. So Jasmine, potentially, could this be a new concern for businesses and to insensitive, and she's definitely something that we need to take into consideration and really take seriously. We've got the potential of nation state hackers going out against other states to gather potential information, political reasons. But then also, I'd say the other small businesses are at risk as well. And it's time to start taking cybersecurity seriously.
So what what businesses do you think is the most vulnerable, like smaller businesses, bigger businesses, or just in general?
The small businesses? Because they probably got less of a budget for cybersecurity? Yes. Yeah, so they're gonna have more vulnerabilities probably exposed that they possibly don't even know about, whereas the nation states can invest a lot more into into the defences.

So how can the Foreign Office prevent this from happening? Again?
It's difficult to say really, but definitely investing in more penetration testing, and getting defensive assessment it health checks, things like that, and just trying to ensure that all the security is up to standard.
And what can what can people do like everyday like individuals, what can they? What can they do to protect themselves like those that aren't necessarily businesses, but just like individuals want to protect themselves? What can they do?

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At home, I would say definitely keeping your passwords a lot more secure, keeping things up to date, that's always something that people get caught out on is, if you've got software that's out of date on supported and you might not even realise it. But yeah, things like that password back best practices. And just trying to might be pressing on things that you don't believe are true, like emails and things like that, because then you can, you know, move forward, but you could ensure stolen, which can turn into a much worse attack.

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So what sort of advice would you give for passwords, like what sort of, if you give us three things that you would recommend passwords,
not using something common and definitely using a mixture of a range of big letters and small letters and numbers and things like that, and if you can symbols, and keeping them as long as you possibly can? Yes, it's like less guessable. You don't want to be using something that's quite obvious, or even just a word because they can be unencrypted, sorry, and cracked. So you want to not be using something like a common word, maybe use things like word letters that would stand for it. So maybe I have a big dog, you would put a h b, d by instead of writing out the word,and like also maybe like, replacing letters with numbers.

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Definitely absolutely idea, like a sign or one with exclamation mark.

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Perfect. And well, thank you, Jasmine for talking us through that. And join us next week when we will be talking about the next major news story with Emma. Thank you.

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