Business insights: understanding the cyber security landscape

As technology advances, it would seem that life becomes easier. Tasks that once required a member of staff, can now be completed with a computer, and introducing new technology allows for staff to focus on delivering projects or helping customers – the possibilities are endless.

But one thing that is often overlooked is how these new technologies impact a business’s cyber security. Cyber attacks are becoming more frequent, cyber criminals are evolving and the types of attacks are becoming more sophisticated. It has been reported that over the last 12 months the UK has experienced a 630% increase in cloud-based cyber attacks.

As part of our ‘business insights’ series, we caught up with managing director Gordon Christie on the most common cyber attacks. Lifting the lid on the more sinister side of the internet, Gordon discusses everything from vulnerabilities and cyber attacks to the dark web, focusing on how businesses can protect themselves from unwanted attention online.

What is a cyber attack?

“A cyber attack is an assault used on single or multiple computers or networks by cybercriminals. Cybercriminals can disable computers, steal data or use a breached computer as the launch point for other attacks.

Now I'm going to show you an example of an unordered list to make sure that looks good, too:

• So here is the first item in this list.
• In this example we're keeping the items short.
• Later, we'll use longer, more complex list items.

And that's the end of this section.

What if we stack headings?

We should make sure that looks good, too.

Sometimes you have headings directly underneath each other. In those cases you often have to undo the top margin on the second heading because it usually looks better for the headings to be closer together than a paragraph followed by a heading should be.

When a heading comes after a paragraph …

When a heading comes after a paragraph, we need a bit more space, like I already mentioned above. Now let's see what a more complex list would look like.

• I often do this thing where list items have headings.

  For some reason I think this looks cool which is unfortunate because it's pretty annoying to get the styles right.

  I often have two or three paragraphs in these list items, too, so the hard part is getting the spacing between the paragraphs, list item heading, and separate list items to all make sense. Pretty tough honestly, you could make a strong argument that you just shouldn't write this way.

• Since this is a list, I need at least two items.

  I explained what I'm doing already in the previous list item, but a list wouldn't be a list if it only had one item, and we really want this to look realistic. That's why I've added this second list item so I actually have something to look at when writing the styles.

• It's not a bad idea to add a third item either.

  I think it probably would've been fine to just use two items but three is definitely not worse, and since I seem to be having no trouble making up arbitrary things to type, I might as well include it.

After this sort of list I usually have a closing statement or paragraph, because it kinda looks weird jumping right to a heading.

Hopefully that looks good enough to you.

What about nested lists?

Nested lists basically always look bad which is why editors like Medium don't even let you do it, but I guess since some of you goofballs are going to do it we have to carry the burden of at least making it work.

1. Nested lists are rarely a good idea.
   • You might feel like you are being really "organized" or something but you are just creating a gross shape on the screen that is hard to read.
   • Nested navigation in UIs is a bad idea too, keep things as flat as possible.
   • Nesting tons of folders in your source code is also not helpful.
2. Since we need to have more items, here's another one.
   • I'm not sure if we'll bother styling more than two levels deep.
   • Two is already too much, three is guaranteed to be a bad idea.
   • If you nest four levels deep you belong in prison.
3. Two items isn't really a list, three is good though.
   • Again please don't nest lists if you want people to actually read your content.
   • Nobody wants to look at this.
   • I'm upset that we even have to bother styling this.

• For example, here's another nested list.

  But this time with a second paragraph.

  • These list items won't have <p> tags
  • Because they are only one line each

• But in this second top-level list item, they will.

  This is especially annoying because of the spacing on this paragraph.

  • As you can see here, because I've added a second line, this list item now has a <p> tag.

    This is the second line I'm talking about by the way.

  • Finally here's another list item so it's more like a list.

• A closing list item, but with no nested list, because why not?

And finally a sentence to close off this section.

There are other elements we need to style

I almost forgot to mention links, like this link to the website. We almost made them primary but that's so yesterday, so we went with dark gray, feels edgier.

We even included table styles, check it out:

Name	Location	Service
IT hotdesk	Aberdeen	Cyber Security
Mission10	Aberdeen	Marketing