There has been a sharp rise in property companies across the UK coming under attack from cyber criminals and hackers, according to Totality Services.

The IT service supplier, which recently won retained contracts with Soho Estates and Pedder, says it is seeing a growing number of estate agencies being targeted by hackers as larger corporates have made it more difficult for criminals to infiltrate their own systems.

The IT service provider, which offers cloud-based IT solutions to a variety of businesses, says too many SME estate agencies do not invest in IT security or on the right security, so they are more likely to be the victims of fraud such as mailbox hacking or data theft.

Luis Navarro, co-Founder at Totality, said “We’ve seen a huge influx in property brands getting in touch with us over the past few months.

“The majority of new business enquiries we receive from property businesses are after they have been through the harrowing experience of a hacking or internal leak, but we also see many property businesses wanting better more efficient service too.

“It’s very common to see a start-up estate agency going with a local one-man-band or a small IT support provider, and as they grow the service levels drop, and the all-important strategic and security advice just isn’t there.

“All business-critical data should be backed up with a 3rd party provider, company-wide security settings should be deployed such as regular enforced password changes and screen lock after a few minutes of inactivity and no staff member should be able to change these settings and agents should deploy DNS protection to prevent ‘man in the middle’ attacks on all laptops and PCs.

“This solution provides an additional layer of protection when accessing the internet from outside the office – it blacklists dangerous sites and filters out unwanted content.”