With October Cybersecurity Awareness Month now is a good time to check with your technology person if you have this risk covered.
The extraordinary return hackers are now getting from their efforts is phenomenal. Improved social engineering, better AI and increased resources all make it much easier to attack more businesses.
If it were a country, this black economy would be the third largest in the world – right after the USA and China.
Here in Tasmania, last year a financial firm was fined $11m due to a hack and data breach. They now have to indemnify any of their customers whose data was stolen, for 10 years. If any are hit with identity theft, they need to compensate them.
Also in Tasmania, only three months ago, JBS Foods paid $14.2m AUD ransom to end a cyber attack.
As you will read in that ABC article:
“US statistics showed 10 companies paid between $US300,000 to $US10 million to get back online in 2020.”
On a smaller scale, I know of two businesses who were hacked and ended up paying a small ransom to get their data and systems back online. The admin person in another business I worked with 10 years ago clicked on something she shouldn’t have. Soon after, when paying supplier invoices, she was unwittingly sending that money to a thief’s bank account instead. It took months to work out they were siphoning money (upon clicking ‘pay’, the malware changed the bank account details being paid).
People are often the weakest link when it comes to these attacks, so training and education for your team is vital.
Do you have anything on this in your induction training? Do you run regular cyber health sessions?
If you haven’t looked at this risk, or lately, have a chat with your technology person and do a review, and add it to your risk register / framework to ensure it gets some attention every quarter.
The Australian Federal government has a big push to help small businesses increase their awareness and education of this risk. Here in Tasmania, The Project Lab are running free CyberUP sessions, and have a tonne of material you can start with here.
