How confident are you with your business' cyber security?

Will all the recent media coverage of high profile data breaches, it would seem that cybercrime is on the increase.

We see news of a data breach in Australia almost every week at the moment.

Medibank is currently in the news for standing firm against their hackers and refusing to pay the ransom that the hackers are demanding otherwise they are threatening to release the personal data of their 9.7 million former and current customers.

This week a data hack at IT firm PNORS Technology Group, which works with six different state departments including Education and Training, may include health records of Victorian school students.

The fallout from the well-publicised Optus data breach is still happening with a Melbourne family losing $40k from suspected identity theft.

So are data breaches and Cybercrime in general increasing?

The answer is, yes.

During the 2020-21 financial year, over 67,500 cybercrime reports were made via ReportCyber. That's a 13 per cent increase from the previous year.

Over $300 million was lost to scams last year.

And these are only factoring in reported hacks and scams, as many occur that are never reported.

Australia is currently 5th in the world for cybercrime density and 11th in the world for the average cost of a data breach ($4.5 million).

We've worked with businesses that have lost tens of thousands of dollars to scams, and some businesses are small as sole traders.

Sadly, over 60% of Australian SMEs don't survive a cyberattack or data breach.

The stakes are high, and every business is a target.

Most businesses don't have adequate cyber security in place.

However, even if they did, it doesn't matter how much Cybersecurity your business has in place, cybercrime is a matter of when not if.

Cyber security is about risk mitigation, so a business can minimise the effects of a cyber incident and hopefully survive it as well.

Until data privacy legislation is forced on all businesses, many just won't act until it's too late.

As a business you need to start planning now, otherwise, it will be a mad rush and costly to get everything in place when stricter legislation does get passed.

Unfortunately, businesses worldwide don't budget enough for cyber security. Australian businesses on average only allocate 10.9% of their IT budget to cyber security.

Cyber security is everyone's responsibility and should be a forethought, not an afterthought.