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.

What's in a password?

Some of you may still not be convinced about the need for a password manager.

It's 2022 and still not all cloud sites and services have the option to enable multi-factor authentication on your account.

Even those of you who have MFA turned on for everything that offers it, may still be at risk for an account breach, depending in the type of MFA you're using.

The standard password complexity we have enforced in ternally and also setup for our clients, is 20 characters - upper and lowercase, numbers and symbols.

That way, even if MFA is not present or is circumvented, it's a pretty difficult password to crack. And because each password is unique as well, there's no risk that the password was involved in a breach on another site.

How secure are your passwords?

Tech Overwhelm And Time Poor: What You Can Do.

We've all been there.

It's 6 pm and you're still at your desk, trying to catch up on that project that's due tomorrow morning. You've just realized that you have to run out to get some groceries, but you haven't had time to put together a meal plan for the week.

You've got a ton of work to do and no time in which to do it.

What if there was a way to streamline your day? To make sure that even if things get busy, you can still get everything done? We reached out to one of our leading tech experts, Avaya Giri and asked him what he does when he's feeling behind or overwhelmed. He gave us some great tips. Here are his top three:

1) Automate: Almost any repetitive jobs you do every day can be automated for you. For example, replying to and filing your emails can be automated for you. It may just be a 30 second job, but 30 seconds 100 times a day really adds up!

2) Know your shortcuts: Shortcuts can be such a powerhouse with the right knowledge. For example; the windows icon + control + C and windows icon + control + V will allow create a copy and paste history for multiple items.

3) Use a password and automated form filler like LastPass. Saving the brain power of remembering your passwords and the time filling in forms can be a game changer. See our blog on LastPass!

Thanks Avaya!

Avaya Giri is one of our leading IT delivery land support technicians, plus all round great guy!

LastPass: The App That’s Saving Our Passwords..And Our Minds!

If you’re like most of us, then you’re probably juggling a lot of passwords. It’s not just your social media accounts that require passwords—you need one for every website, app and service you use. It can be a nightmare to remember them all.

The good news is there are tools out there that can help manage all those passwords for you. Our favourite is LastPass.

LastPass is an online password manager that allows users to not just store their passwords but also payment details, shipping addresses, insurance numbers.. anything that is important and hard to remember without jotting it down (please don’t!). It will save your important information, but will also auto fill your forms to save time.

LastPass is useful as it offers browser extensions that:

• automatically fill in your passwords

• allows you to log into sites without having to enter your details

• allows you to generate strong, randomised and unique passwords for all your accounts notifying you if you’ve used the same password for multiple accounts

• warn you if your email address(es) has been involved in a known data breach; store other digital records like your insurance numbers, and much more

How safe is it?

LastPass is extremely secure. It has a zero-knowledge policy, meaning that all information stored on LastPass’ servers is totally encrypted. No one else—not even LastPass employees—can see it.

The company also offers strong end-to-end encryption. This means that your information is encrypted before it leaves your device in transit and at rest, protecting you from man-in-the-middle attacks.

It's true LastPass itself has suffered from seven security incidents in the last eleven years. As we always say, everything is hackable and how a company responds to a Cyber incident is just as important as the preventative Cyber Security measures they have in place, and all seven were handled swiftly and well.

Preparing For The .au Domain Release: What You Need To Know...

It's finally here!

The new .au domain has been released and it's a huge deal for Australian businesses.

This is an exciting opportunity to catch up with our international counterparts, to pick up domains we may of missed out on and to shorten our domain name. But we also know that there are risks involved, like the possibility of hackers purchasing your domain and creating a copycat of your site.

Its important to act now to apply for Priority Allocation, or your .au domain name will be available to the public from 20 September 2022. Unlike .com.au domains, .au do not require ABN or ACN checks, so more vulnerable to scammers

For the same reasons, we also strongly recommend you register .com and .net domains. Of course, there are other domain extensions, but these are the most obvious ones, and the ones most likely for scammers to purchase in the attempt to pretend to be you.

We can help you prepare for the release and avoid this from happening in the first place. We'll make sure your website is secure, so when you launch your new .au domain, you can focus on what matters most: serving your customers and getting all the great benefits the .au can bring.