16/07/2026
612,000. That's roughly how many UK businesses experienced a cyber breach or attack in the last 12 months, according to the government's own Cyber Security Breaches Survey.
Phishing was behind the vast majority of them.
Not sophisticated nation-state tooling. Not zero-days. Emails that looked plausible enough for someone to click.
Cyber Essentials exists almost entirely to close the gaps that make phishing effective once someone does click: unpatched software, no MFA, accounts with more access than they need. It's not designed to make you unhackable, but rather, to stop the click from becoming the whole story.
If someone on your team clicked a bad link tomorrow, what would actually stop it from spreading?