Cyber security firm on track to more than treble revenues over next two years

ECSC, THE Cyber security firm, is on track to more than treble revenues over the next two years as it continues to capitalise on the growing digital threat to bluechip firms.

Chief executive Ian Mann said that booming business will see staff numbers more than double to 200 by next year, with Bradford-based ECSC opening a new incident response centre in London to cope with growing demand.

Mr Mann said: “We weren’t meeting demand last year, and there’s a lot of demand out there. The proceeds from the initial public offering will be used to scale up and we’re on track to meet our longer-term forecasts.

“We’re opening an incident response centre in London that will enable us to get people on site quicker if there’s an incident. At the moment, we have to shift equipment from Yorkshire.”

The Bradford-based firm is forecast to have pulled in £4.4m in sales last year and is projected to see revenues swell to £15.5m by 2019. ECSC, which boasts clients such as Barclays, GCHQ and Holland & Barrett, listed on London’s junior AIM market in December with a valuation of £15m. The group’s services include instant response to hacking attacks, testing for threats and managing company security systems.

Several high-profile cyber incidents have hit the headlines over the past few years.

Telecoms giant TalkTalk was hit by what it described as a “significant and sustained” attack on its website in 2015.

Across the Atlantic, internet giant Yahoo suffered a data breach in September, impacting eight million UK user accounts and 500 million accounts globally.

But Mr Mann said that many firms, including TalkTalk, have only themselves to blame. “If you look at TalkTalk, they were stupid, they dropped the ball, they weren’t managing things at all and therefore you deserve to get hacked.

“Most people get hacked because they’re doing something stupid,” he added.