Age UK South Lakes charity has taken steps to enhance its cyber security by signing a contract with Newcastle-based Melius Cyber Safe for penetration testing and daily security scanning services.

The charity also produces the ISO/IEC 27001-compliant Compass and BuyCharity software solutions, without charge, for 320 other charities.

Melius Cyber Safe will now be used to enhance security even further, implementing continuous monitoring and penetration testing across the organisation to provide daily vulnerability and threat detection, and enabling quicker identification of vulnerabilities, and consequently lower risk.

David Warren, director at Melius, said: “According to the Charity Commission one in eight charities were the victims of cyber-attacks in the last 12 months. We believe that this will increase as many voluntary organisations do not have the skills and resources to protect themselves. Our platform is designed to assist smaller businesses and will make achieving the new 2022 version of ISO 27001 far simpler. We are delighted to support Age UK South Lakeland and hope to help even more charities in the future.”