'Billions of threats': Scotland’s most advanced cyber defence hub opens in Glasgow

Scotland’s most advanced cyber defence has opened its doors, monitoring what experts say are “billions of potential threats”.

Acumen Cyber, an engineer-powered cyber security service provider, has opened its Security Operations Centre (SOC) at the £9m EastWorks development in Glasgow.

The firm will track and block events every year to help protect companies from a potential 17 billion threat events on a weekly basis.

Scottish Government business minister Richard Lochhead cut the ribbon on the facility in Dalmarnock on Wednesday.

Opening of Scotland’s most advanced cyber defence hub. STV News

A number of Scottish health boards have suffered from cyber attacks in recent years, with data stolen at a cost to the NHS.

Last year, a global IT outage from Cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike impacted millions and led to travel chaos across the globe.

Kevin Robertson, co-founder of Acumen Cyber, says they are dealing with “billions of events every single day”.

He added: “You know, an event can be as simple as someone logging into a system or sending an email and those billions of events, you cannot manually go through them.

“You cannot, as an IT team or a technology department, look at that without advance tooling, advance processes and advance people that know what they’re looking at.

“And that’s where we come in.

“We’ve made significant investment into all of the above and we’re able to give that in a cost effective way to businesses that cannot afford to go out and spend seven figures on building essentially what we’ve built.”

Lochead said: “With around half of all UK businesses and a third of charities reporting some form of cyber breach or attack last year, cyber-crime is a growing and evolving threat to our economy and national security.

“It’s essential that organisations have the right support and expertise to deal with these threats.

“Acumen Cyber is a great example of a Scottish business – not only responding to the serious issue of cybersecurity, but also developing innovation that will contribute to the creation of jobs and deliver benefits across the local economy.

“I wish it every success and look forward to see it growing and developing further from its new Eastworks base.”