If you’ve walked past a bus shelter in Belfast this week, you may have been told that “Hackers love a business where the ex-employee still has the login”, or that your WiFi password shouldn’t be on the wall.
The bright yellow posters are part of Mind Yer Business, a new campaign telling Northern Ireland’s businesses to “mind yer business” and giving every firm here a free, 10-minute online cyber check to help them do it.
The campaign launched this month to coincide with Cyber Security Awareness Month, whose theme this year is “Don’t Make It Easy for Them.” That is the whole idea behind the check: most attacks go looking for the easiest way in, so ten minutes spent closing the obvious gaps is how you stop being the easy option.
It is run by CyberAxis, a Northern Ireland programme led by Belfast workplace technology company TalentSensus and cyber skills organisation CyberSpark Group.
Over the coming weeks the campaign will appear on billboards, bus shelters and digital screens across Northern Ireland, including at George Best Belfast City Airport, as well as on local radio and social media. Bangor FC has also got behind it, with Mind Yer Business as a match ball sponsor. The messages are written the way people here speak: “Hackers love a business that thinks it’s too small to be hacked.” “Your password’s on a Post-it. We’ve all done it. Sure it’s easy fixed.”
The free check, at mindyerbusinessni.com, asks business owners a short set of plain-English questions about passwords, backups, software updates, email, staff access and suppliers. At the end they get a score, the specific gaps leaving them exposed and a prioritised action plan showing what they can fix themselves first. No technical knowledge is needed and results are private.
Nine in ten businesses in Northern Ireland employ fewer than ten people, according to official figures, and most have no one whose job is cyber security. Across the UK, 43% of businesses reported a breach or attack in the last 12 months, rising to 46% of small businesses, according to the DSIT Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/26. Only around one in four businesses has a formal plan for what to do when it happens.
Stephen Rice, CEO of TalentSensus, said:
“Most businesses in Northern Ireland don’t have anyone whose dedicated job is cyber security. It falls to the owner, the office manager or whoever’s best with computers, whilst they all have day jobs too. The attacks that are hitting firms here usually aren’t clever. They’re automated, and they go looking for the easiest way in: a reused password, a backup nobody’s checked, a former employee who still has a login.
“We’ve all done some of these things. The point of Mind Yer Business is that most of it is easily fixed once you know where to look, and ten minutes is all it takes to find out. It’s your business, so it’s your responsibility, even if you’ve an IT company looking after things.”
As well as helping individual firms, the anonymised results will show where Northern Ireland most needs cyber skills. The wider CyberAxis project, supported by TechLocal funding, uses this picture to connect businesses with new local cyber talent, including career starters, career changers and people returning to work. The programme aims to place more than 50 people into cyber security jobs, at least 25 of them women, supported by the hands-on experience gained through the Hack the Isles cyber training programme in Belfast.
Richard Coates, CEO of CyberSpark, said:
“Cyber security here is a skills problem as much as a technology problem. Every business that takes the check gets its own action plan, but taken together the results tell us where the gaps really are across Northern Ireland, and that shapes how we train the next generation of local talent.
“UK Artificial Intelligence Minister Kanishka Narayan warned that it is ‘likely, if not inevitable’ that the country’s cyber defences will be breached by artificial intelligence. We teach you how to get in the game.
“Through Hack the Isles we’re bringing new people into the industry from all sorts of backgrounds: career returners, retraining women and young people. Protecting local businesses and building local jobs go hand in hand. So take ten minutes, do the check, don’t make it easy for them, and tell the hackers to mind theirs.”
The free cyber check is open now to every business in Northern Ireland at mindyerbusinessni.com.