This week a secondary school in Buckinghamshire, England, had to close its doors – not because of weather or strikes, but because of malware. The headteacher at Great Marlow School blamed a malware incident for disruption to the school’s IT systems and communications, leaving staff unable to operate normally.
It is a useful reminder that cyber attacks do not just hit banks and big corporations. Schools, clinics, trades businesses and local firms run on the same email, files and booking systems – and when those go down, the doors effectively shut. In the same week, Oracle warned of a security flaw in its software that a cybercrime gang says it is exploiting, with Google notifying more than 100 organisations that they may have been running vulnerable servers. Attackers work at scale; they do not check how big you are first.
What this means for your business
You do not need an enterprise budget to avoid being the next story. Three things make the biggest difference:
- Have backups you have actually tested. A backup that has never been restored is a hope, not a plan. Keep at least one copy offline or in the cloud, separate from your main systems.
- Patch promptly. The Oracle campaign worked because vulnerable servers were left exposed. Turn on automatic updates where you can, and have someone responsible for the rest.
- Plan for a day without IT. Write down how you would contact staff and customers if email and phones went down. The school’s biggest problem was not the malware itself – it was losing the ability to communicate.
An hour of preparation now beats a week of closed doors later.
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