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Cyber

How to prepare your home for a cyber-attack

Britain's most damaging cyber-attacks so far hit companies, but households felt them: empty shelves, cancelled orders, stolen data. Here is how to prepare on both fronts.

T‑MINUS EditorialUpdated 8 min read

The rise in attacks

In the year to September 2025, the National Cyber Security Centre dealt with 204 nationally significant cyber incidents, more than double the 89 of the year before, PA reported. The same year produced the most expensive attack Britain has recorded: the Cyber Monitoring Centre estimated that the attack on Jaguar Land Rover, which halted UK production for five weeks, cost the economy around £1.9 billion.

And the agency expects worse, not better. Its 2025 assessment warned that AI is making intrusions more effective and widening the attack surface of national infrastructure.

What an attack feels like at home

In spring 2025, cyber-attacks on M&S and the Co-op meant online orders stopped for weeks, gaps appeared on shelves and members' data was taken. None of that was a national emergency. All of it reached ordinary households. An attack on an energy company, a water company, a bank or a payments network would reach them faster.

Digital preparation

  • Turn on two-step verification or passkeys for email, banking and your phone account.
  • Back up photos and documents to a drive you keep offline, as well as the cloud.
  • Keep printed copies of the documents you'd need to prove who you are.
  • Keep a spare, charged phone and car keys in a signal-blocking pouch.
  • Know how to contact your bank by phone, not just through the app.

Physical preparation

The most likely way a cyber-attack affects your family is through the things networks deliver: power, payments, communications and food. So the physical preparation is the same as for a long power cut: water, food, warmth, light, a radio, cash and a plan. The Government's Be Ready checklist asks for three days of each.

The ten-minute checklist

  1. Cash at home in small notes.
  2. Three days of water: three litres per person per day.
  3. Three days of food that needs no cooking or only hot water.
  4. A wind-up radio and a charged power bank.
  5. A torch per person.
  6. Printed documents, numbers and a medication list.
  7. A first aid kit and a week of your medicines.
  8. Passkeys or two-step verification on key accounts.
  9. An offline backup of what you can't lose.
  10. A plan for meeting up if phones fail.

Sources

  1. Cyber-attacks of 2025, PA via Irish News
  2. Impact of AI on cyber threat from now to 2027, NCSC (May 2025)
  3. Be Ready checklist, UK Government