This October is the fifth European Cyber Security Month, an annual awareness campaign that hopes to raise awareness of cyber security threats.

Alongside this, the campaign hopes to promote cyber security among individuals and organisations, as well as providing the necessary resources to protect themselves online.

To help raise awareness, SALT.agency is interviewing one cyber security expert a week to see what their take is on the evolution of cyber security, how aware businesses are today, and what we need to prepare ourselves for in the future.

This week we’re talking to officer Jake Moore from the Dorset Police Cyber Crime Unit.

Take a look at what he had to say about Cyber Crime below:

People who work in digital industries are becoming increasingly aware and apart of cyber security, but do you think awareness has risen for the average person?

Short answer is yes but it’s not just a digital industry factor, it is also compounded with age groups.

I speak to many digital start ups who are usually well aware of the new threats and most take measures to mitigate these risks they have learnt about.

For example, I see more and more 20-35 year olds using password managers; much more than any other age group.

However, I am still seeing the other side of the coin where people find security an “inconvenience”.

This is where problems still lie and these are the ones who are targeted.

For example, people may be in high positions in digital industries but in departments who have little knowledge about security (stereotypically speaking the old guy in finance) with the same “cats name” password for work and home accounts poses a huge threat to that or any company.

What advice would you give to the person on the street in regards to cyber security and their personal details?

Use a password manager, set up two factor authentication on ALL accounts and beware of the latest term on the block “social engineering” where people will try and bypass security into buildings or even manipulate your security answers to reset passwords (for example find out your first school in an attempt to reset a password from security questions).

There were more than 1,000 incidents reported by the National Cyber Security Centre in its first year of operation, does this number surprise you? Would you expect it to go up in 2018?

This number surprises me, yes, as I thought it would have been 100 times more.

Cyber breaches are well known to be underreported so this number still will not truly represent the actual data.

I speak with businesses weekly in order to build on their cyber security and I am told of attacks such as Ransomware on a regular occurrence yet none of them tend to report it.

This is solely because they cannot deal with the possibility that the story may get out and damage their brand and marketing.

None of the incidents reported were classed as category one levels, which would involve interference with the democratic system. Given what’s happened in the US, do you feel that security experts should be guarding against foreign meddling in future UK elections?

I think there is always a level of guarding any sort of foreign meddling, however, as long as UK elections stay in paper format, we should not need to worry about it much more than is in place.

There are other dangers which pose a bigger threat such as cyber attacks on power or water supplies which need mitigation and therefore more funding.