What is a cyber-attack?

A cyber-attack is where someone maliciously tries to:

• Damage – for example by deleting a database (potentially also stealing a copy of it at the same time)
• Disrupt – for example a Denial of Service Attack, where someone uses a program to visit a website from lots of different devices at once in an effort to overload its capacity and cause it to crash.
• Gain unauthorised access – for example by trying to guess your email password or getting you to hand it over to them by filling in a legitimate looking form. This will then give them access to your emails and any accounts where you are using the same email and password combination.