Thoughts of a CEO October 2024

Our annual conference has been put to bed, and what a great conference it was too – speakers, workshops, stalls, lunch and a hundred or so of you lovely people. I thought we had a while before we needed to think about next year’s conference, but Justine (the brains behind the conference) is already reviewing feedback and throwing ideas around on how next year’s can be even better!

I was also thinking about coincidences. Last week, the National Voluntary and Community Sector Emergencies Partnership invited me to a desktop exercise looking at how we would collectively respond to a significant cyber attack that wiped out our emails, cloud services, even phone lines. What would we do? How would we make sure the people we support weren’t unsupported? How on earth would we communicate (smoke signals?).

I was happy and fascinated to accept the invitation, which happened to coincide with a strange, sudden spike in dodgy emails apparently coming from non-dodgy contacts… “Hi, it’s me, could you send me an Apple Gift card please”… “I’m attaching an invoice, can you open it and sign it please”… and various variations on the theme. Some are pretty easy to spot but some are very, very clever. One email that we received a while back asked us to transfer some money to an account, – this communication looked like it came from me and read very much like a legitimate request. We might have made that payment if our eagle-eyed Finance Assistant (thanks Sam!) hadn’t noticed that it wasn’t signed off in the way I would normally sign something off and chose to call me to confirm whether it was real.

According to the University of Central Lancashire, there were 7.78 million cyber-crimes in the last 12 months, and around a third of charities reported some kind of breach or attack. According to the data, the average cost of a successful attack was about £460. I don’t know about you, but I can think of better uses for that £460 than lining a scammer’s pockets.

We will add an agenda item on Cyber Security at our next Surrey Charities Forum meeting, but if you can’t wait, the Police’s South East Cyber Resilience Centre has some very useful tools to help you prevent and deal with cyber-threats up to and including a free 30-minute chat to talk to you about your risks and response. Worth checking out, I feel.

Finally, because I am a nerd at heart, I will leave you with this, in a broad Austrian accent:

I’ll be back.

Do you see what I did there?