More readability, the creation of a national marketplace and more awareness with a TV advertising campaign. Here are the three recommendations from the Cyber Campus report submitted a few days ago to the minister in charge of digital transition Jean-Noël Barrot. In December 2022, the latter commissioned Michel Van Den Berghe, the boss of this new totem of French cybersecurity, on this subject.
In this 32-page document, the Cyber Campus teams underline the urgency of stepping up support policies for the cybersecurity of small and medium-sized businesses. Anssi, the State cyber fire brigade, noted “for the first time in 2022 a reduction” in successful attacks against large groups and “a diversion of the threat towards SMEs”, they recall.
Little prepared
However, small and medium-sized businesses are “dependent on digital technologies but poorly prepared to face the risks”, add the authors of the report, the fault of a lack of means, time or knowledge. Which makes their cybersecurity a “real risk for our economic health”. First of all, the Cyber Campus teams are calling for cybersecurity diagnostic systems to be made more readable, the implementation of which is “insufficiently monitored by the implementation of measures by SMEs”.
Concretely, the Cyber Campus proposes to extend the “MonAideCyber” experiment – a rapid diagnosis of around forty questions leading to six hierarchical recommendations – from New Aquitaine alone to other regions. Likewise, the structure proposes to decline the Anssi routes intended for communities for the benefit of small businesses.
TV campaign
“Although SMEs are increasingly aware of cyber risk, they do not know where to turn,” the authors of the report also explain. If the Cybermalveillance public interest group has already formed a network of IT security professionals, the Cyber Campus considers itself “the right actor” to set up this national marketplace for cybersecurity offers, with a review of offers based on the size of the companies, their location, their maturity and their sector of activity.
The Cyber Campus finally calls for broad awareness among SMEs, with the production of a communication kit and above all a television spot campaign, like what is done for road safety. This prevention action, developed by the structure and Cybermalveillance, would redirect entrepreneurs towards this latter platform as well as towards the future “17 cyber” supported by the Ministry of the Interior. A type of campaign which could represent an annual budget of four million euros, the Court of Auditors reported in 2022.