Protecting Yorkshire’s Businesses: Building Cyber Resilience for a Thriving Region

Yorkshire has always been known for doing business the right way.

Straight talking, ambitious, and built on strong relationships. That ethos is reflected in communities like The Yorkshire Mafia, where collaboration and long term value matters.

Today, Yorkshire and the Humber is home to around 683,000 registered companies, representing about 5.8% of all UK businesses and reflecting the region’s economic diversity and scale. From fast growing SMEs, to nationally recognised brands, the region has become one of the UK’s most economically diverse and digitally ambitious business communities.

That success story brings opportunity, but it also brings exposure. As organisations grow and scale, they rely more heavily on digital systems, and cyber risk naturally increases. This isn’t a cause for alarm. It’s simply a reality of modern business.

The good news is that cyber resilience is achievable, practical, and increasingly accessible for organisations of all sizes.

In this article, we’ll explore why Yorkshire’s success and digital ambition naturally make it attractive to cybercriminals, but more importantly, what you can do about it. We’ll focus on practical steps that will help businesses across the region strengthen their cyber resilience, reduce risk, and protect what they’ve worked hard to build.

Why Yorkshire is an attractive target for cybercriminals

Cybercriminals are driven by opportunity, not geography. Yorkshire’s appeal lies in its commercial strength.

The region represents one of the largest concentrations of economic activity outside London. Financial services, professional services, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, retail, and technology all play a major role in Yorkshire’s economy.

Leeds in particular is widely recognised as a national centre for financial and professional services, hosting more than 30 national and international banks and over 150 accountancy firms – with the financial and professional services cluster in Yorkshire employing tens of thousands of people and contributing billions to the local economy.

Leeds now has more large corporate headquarters than any other UK city outside of London, with 203 firms headquartered there. This underlines its growing importance as a financial and business hub.

Alongside this economic density, Yorkshire businesses are digitally ambitious. Cloud adoption has accelerated, remote and hybrid working are now the norm, and e-commerce and digital supply chains underpin our day-to-day operations. Manufacturing and logistics organisations are also increasingly reliant on operational technology (OT) and connected systems.

For cybercriminals, this combination is unfortunately very attractive. Valuable data, business critical systems, and interconnected supply chains offer multiple entry points for them to attempt to exploit. Attacks are rarely targeted at a region, they’re aimed at organisations where disruption, data access, or financial gain will be highly profitable.

What recent cyber incidents tell us

Many of the publicly reported cyber incidents involving Yorkshire-based organisations in recent years have stemmed from third-party and supply-chain compromise, rather than attackers directly breaching internal systems.

Morrisons experienced operational disruption after a ransomware attack affected a key supply-chain software provider used across its distribution network. While Morrisons’ own systems were not directly compromised, the incident disrupted warehouse operations and highlighted how reliance on shared platforms can introduce risk beyond an organisation’s immediate control.

In early 2025, Leeds United disclosed a cyber incident affecting its online retail environment, resulting in a limited number of customers’ payment card details being compromised. The club confirmed the issue was isolated to its e-commerce platform rather than its wider internal systems, demonstrating how externally accessible services are often targeted due to their direct connection to customer data (Leeds United official statement, March 2025).

In both cases, the attacks didn’t rely on advanced techniques. They exploited the delayed detection of third-party exposure and weaknesses in externally facing systems.

Reporting on recent cyberattacks, including the highly publicised attacks on M&S and JLR in 2025, consistently shows that stolen credentials, misconfigured services, and systems that aren’t actively monitored feature far more frequently in real world incidents than sophisticated malware or nation state activity. This emphasises the importance of basic cyber hygiene and monitoring in cyber protection strategies.

In several cases we’ve seen, organisations only become aware of an issue after customers were affected or operations were disrupted. It’s important that you have visibility of your entire estate, monitoring, and early response in place to effectively protect your business.

The key takeaway for business leaders is that many incidents are preventable when the right foundations are in place. Early visibility, basic controls, and clear ownership dramatically reduce both the likelihood and impact of an attack.

The real cyber challenge for Yorkshire businesses today

For many organisations, the challenge is that growth often outpaces governance.

IT and security teams are stretched as businesses scale, new platforms are adopted, and they must constantly respond to customer demands. Cyber security responsibilities are added incrementally, often without the time or resources to step back and assess the overall risk.

Compliance expectations are also increasing. Customers and partners want assurance that their data is protected. Standards such as ISO 27001 and supply chain security requirements are becoming baseline expectations rather than differentiators.

At the same time, there are skills and visibility gaps. Most organisations don’t have the skills or in-house security specialists to be able to build 24/7 monitoring. Alongside this, smaller or mid-sized businesses that assume they’re too small or uninteresting to be targeted. Unfortunately, the opposite is true.

Effective cyber security protection isn’t a one-off project. It’s a journey. It’s important to understand that you don’t need enterprise budgets to be able to make meaningful reductions in your business risk.

What good cyber resilience actually looks like

Effective cyber resilience should start with strong foundations. Schemes such as Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus provide a proven baseline, focusing on cyber hygiene and getting the basics right. These controls are designed to protect against 80% of common cyber threats and the vast majority of online attacks.

This makes them an extremely effective starting point for organisations beginning their cyber maturity journey or those supplying the public sector.

Beyond that foundation, good cyber resilience should be outcome focused.

• Visibility: Visibility means understanding what systems and data you have, what is exposed, and what matters most to the business.
• Early detection: Detection and response ensure that issues are identified early, before they escalate into operational or reputational damage.
• Regular assurance: Activities such as penetration testing and security assessments helps validate that controls work in practice, not just on paper.
• Clear controls and processes: People and process matter as much as technology. Clear ownership, rehearsed incident response plans, and informed staff all play a critical role.

When done well, cyber resilience becomes a business enabler. It builds trust with your customers and partners, supports your business growth, and helps to protect Yorkshire’s reputation for reliability and quality.

Why working with a local cyber security partner matters

Cyber security isn’t just a technical discipline. Advanced tooling without the right expertise may not be deployed effectively, and technology alone doesn’t provide the context needed to respond to evolving threats or regulatory change.

Working with a local cyber security partner means working with people who understand regional industries, supply chains, and the realities of doing business in Yorkshire. It provides you with expertise around UK regulatory and compliance expectations, and the ability to translate them into practical actions.

DigitalXRAID was born and bred in Yorkshire. We bring over 25 years cyber security expertise, and have some of the most qualified cyber professionals in the country ready to protect your business.

As a Yorkshire headquartered business, we work with our community to protect before, during, and after incidents, focusing on guidance, partnership, and long term resilience.

Being accessible, accountable, and part of the same business community makes a real difference when it matters most. The DigitalXRAID team are here to make sure the bad guys don’t win when it comes to Yorkshire based businesses.

Protecting Yorkshire’s growth together

Yorkshire’s business community has always been built on ambition, collaboration, and trust. Cyber security doesn’t need to be complex or intimidating to support that growth – but it is an essential piece of the puzzle.

With the right foundations and the right advice, organisations of all sizes can improve cyber resilience and move forward with confidence.

As part of our commitment to the local business community, members of The Yorkshire Mafia receive an exclusive 20% discount on DigitalXRAID services. Each contracted service also includes a free vulnerability assessment of 1 web application, or up to 25 external infrastructure IPs.

If you’d like to discuss your cyber security challenges with DigitalXRAID’s experts, get in touch – speak to a local team that understands your business and your region.