Unfortunately cyber attacks have increased in frequency and severity. The 2025 Cyber Breaches Survey reported that 43% of businesses experienced a cyber breach in the past 12 months. A cyber breach could have a devastating effect on small businesses, leading to financial losses, reputational damage, operational disruptions, and legal consequences. so improving your cyber resilience is essential for all small organisations.
Many small organisations don’t have the budget for expensive security solutions. The good news, there are free cyber security tools available that can help you protect your business from hackers, data breaches and cyber threats.
This guide lists some of the free cyber security tools and services that are easy to use, even if you are not tech savvy!
NCSC’s free Cyber Action Plan:
The National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) free Cyber Action Plan is a free tool which is part of the Cyber Aware Campaign that generates a personalised action plan for your business. This quick questionnaire will provide you with a personalised plan for you to implement in your business to improve your cyber resilience.
Check Your Cyber Security:
Check Your Cyber Security is a free government service provided by NCSC for UK organisations performs a range of simple online checks to identify common vulnerabilities in your public-facing IT.
All checks are remote, without the need to install software and uses the same kind of publicly available information as cyber criminals use to find easy targets.
It looks at three areas;
- IP Address & website: Check if cyber criminals could attack your systems to gain access to your data via the internet.
- Email: Check if the emails you send are secure or could be intercepted or forged.
- Web browser: Check if your web browser is out of date and vulnerable to exploitation by criminals.
Cyber Essentials:
Cyber Essentials is a Government-backed certification scheme that helps keep your organisation’s and your customers’ data safe from cyber attacks.
The NCSC recommends Cyber Essentials as the minimum standard of cyber security for all organisations.
Who is cyber essentials for?
Cyber essentials can help every organisations guard against the most common cyber attacks. If you have digital assets or store any data, putting the Cyber Essentials controls in place can help you keep it safe.
Free Cyber Security Training for Staff:
The NCSC have created a free e-learning package ‘Staying Safe Online:Top Tips For Staff’. The training takes less than 30 minutes to complete and introduces why cyber security is important and how attacks happen. The training covers four key areas:
- Defending yourself against phishing
- Using strong passwords
- Securing your devices
- Reporting incidents
Early Warning:
Early Warning is a free NCSC service designed to inform your organisation of potential cyber attacks on your network, as soon as possible, potentially giving you the crucial time needed to combat it.
Early warning can help provide you with a basic layer of cyber security. This service is free and easy to use.
What Early Warning can do you:
- Receive alerts of malware and vulnerabilities affecting your network.
- Increase your organisations security by being aware of low-grade incidents which could grow to much bigger issues, so you can act on them before they become a bigger problem.
- Increase confident in the security of your network.
More information and how to sign up can be found on the NCSC Early Warning Page.
Action Fraud:
Action Fraud is the UK’s national reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime where you should report fraud if you have been scammed, defrauded or experienced cyber crime.
If you are a business, charity or other organisation which is currently suffering a cyber attack report this to Action Fraud either via their online reporting service: or by calling 0300 123 2040 . This service provides 24/7 live cyber reporting for businesses.