You may be a small business owner with one or two fashion stores or you may be responsible perhaps for mission critical activities in high security buildings. Regardless of the size or complexity of your security system, the need for cyber security has never been greater.

At Tyco, we believe the prime responsibility for combatting efforts access to confidential data or video by individual opportunistic hacker or organised criminal gangs lies squarely with the manufacturers of hardware and software solutions. In this respect, the threat to the reputation of the electronic security industry and more importantly, the potential consequential loss to our customers, has fully justified the significant efforts made by Tyco design engineers to ensure the credentials of security solutions is our number one priority.

The Tyco Cyber Protection Program is one of the industry's first to offer a holistic approach to cyber security for physical security products. The six part program is designed to give installers, systems integrators and end-users the confidence that we have minimised the possibility of introducing vulnerabilities into our electronic security solutions. It has been developed with the benefit of experience of providing high security and mission critical solutions to Government and multi-national customers over several decades.

The program takes on-board feedback from IT, security professional and cyber security experts in order to combine best practice during the product development, testing and evaluation process, as well as configuration guidelines for compliance in order to protect our physical security products from attack, damage, disruption, unauthorised access or misuse.

We have set the bar extremely high with our Software House access control solutions, American Dynamics video management systems and Illustra IP cameras, and are committed to employing the same cyber safety mindset across other product lines within our product portfolio.

An unsecured IP camera or access control device can be the weakest link in any security system as it offers the opportunity for hackers to find a way onto a company's network with the possibility to gain access to company confidential data, disable systems and disrupt operations. With this in mind, in addition to the testing conducted by our Cyber Protection team, we arrange for independent testing to be conducted annually on our products to ensure that any new firmware or software updates do not open the ‘back door'.

Tyco understands that a system secured today may become insecure tomorrow with the announcement of a new vulnerability. The Cyber Protection team is constantly monitoring a variety of sources, from the US National Vulnerability Database, to various media and professional sources to identify new vulnerabilities that may impact our cyber program-compliant products.

Read more about the Tyco Cyber Protection Program