Our upcoming cybersecurity webinar is free to attend, takes twenty-five minutes of your Tuesday afternoon and could be the most commercially useful thing you do this September. It is called 'WBS Webinar: Prepared by design: what to do before, during and after a cyber attack', it runs on Tuesday 29 September 2026 at 14:00 and it is delivered online by the team at Wyvern Business Systems.
SIGN UP HERE: Cyber Security: Prepared By Design.
The government's Cyber Security Breaches Survey, published in April 2026, found that 43 per cent of UK businesses identified a breach or attack in the previous twelve months. That figure translates to roughly 612,000 firms. The threats driving those numbers are no longer what most people picture when they think of cybercrime.
For twenty years, the standard advice on spotting a fraudulent email was to look for bad spelling and clumsy grammar. That advice no longer stands. In May 2026, the Information Commissioner's Office set out the threats it expects UK organisations to prepare for, including AI-generated phishing that impersonates trusted contacts, cloned audio and video used to authorise payments and automated tools that identify and exploit weaknesses at machine speed. The attack surface has changed fundamentally, and the skills that protected you five years ago will not protect you now.
The same Cyber Security Breaches Survey found that only 47 per cent of UK businesses use two-factor authentication, 34 per cent apply security updates within a fortnight and 19 per cent ran any form of staff training in the previous year. New threats are growing, but protection has not kept pace.
The statistic that deserves the most attention is this one: only 25 per cent of UK businesses have a written incident response plan. Among businesses with fewer than ten employees, that figure falls to 21 per cent. Larger organisations are rarely more resilient because of the equipment they buy. They are more resilient because somebody has written down what happens next and assigned it to a named person. Without that document, the first hour of a cyber attack is chaos and chaos is expensive.
This is precisely the gap the WBS webinar is designed to close.
The session is structured around three distinct phases, because a cyber attack is not a single event. It is a sequence and your response needs to match that sequence.
The first section covers prevention. Not every control, not an exhaustive list, but the five technical measures that, according to the ICO's own guidance, stop the majority of common attacks. These are practical steps that any business can implement, regardless of the size of its IT budget. If your business has not yet worked through Cyber Essentials certification, this section will show you exactly where to start.
When an attack is underway, most business owners freeze because they have no script to follow. The second section of the webinar sets out how to recognise that an attack is happening and what actions to take in the first sixty minutes, presented in the order you need to take them. Speed matters here and so does sequence. The wrong action taken first can make recovery significantly harder.
The third section covers what follows once the immediate threat is contained. This includes the recovery process, who you are legally required to notify and within what timescale and the current position on ransom payments. The notification rules in particular catch many business owners off guard. Getting them wrong adds a regulatory consequence on top of an already difficult situation.
The webinar is designed for business owners and managers, not IT specialists. No prior technical knowledge is assumed. There is no sales presentation. The session is practical rather than technical and it treats attendees as intelligent people who are time-poor, not as an audience to be impressed with acronyms.
If you have been meaning to get your managed IT support and cyber security arrangements in better shape but have not found the right moment, this session gives you a clear starting point. It also applies directly to the obligations employers carry under health and safety and data protection law, which connects to broader workplace support considerations for any business with staff handling sensitive data.
The session runs for twenty minutes, with five minutes reserved for questions. Everyone who attends receives a written guide covering the same ground as the session, including a self-audit and a one-page incident response plan template to complete for their own organisation. That template alone is worth more than the time it takes to attend.
WBS has provided managed IT solutions across Herefordshire and the surrounding counties for over two decades. In that time, the team has seen what happens when businesses face an attack without a plan and what changes when they have one.
The webinar reflects that same philosophy. Proactive preparation produces better outcomes than reactive scrambling. You can read more about the return on investment that proactive IT management delivers in our earlier piece on the subject.
For those who want to understand the broader picture of cyber threats facing smaller firms, our guide to the top cybersecurity threats facing SMEs in 2025 provides useful context.
The ICO's published guidance on cyber threats is publicly available and worth reading alongside this session.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need any technical knowledge to follow the webinar?
No. The session is aimed at business owners and managers and assumes no prior IT knowledge. Everything is explained in plain language, and the focus throughout is on decisions and actions rather than technical detail.
What do I receive when I attend?
Every attendee receives a written guide covering the three sections of the session, a self-audit checklist and a one-page incident response plan template they can complete for their own business.
Is the webinar really free?
Yes. The session is free to attend and there is no sales presentation. It runs for twenty minutes with five minutes for questions.
Who should attend from my business?
The session is most useful for whoever makes decisions about operations, IT or compliance. That is typically the business owner, managing director or operations manager. It does not require your IT person to be present, though they are welcome., This free cybersecurity webinar on 24 September 2026 is a practical, no-obligation session for any business owner or manager who wants to move from vague concern about cyber risk to a clear, written plan. Register your place or get in touch with the team at Wyvern Business Systems to find out more.