Cybersecurity articles

Hi all,   This month there are a few items on the agenda and as per last month, I’m going to try and keep the IT security side of things brief!   Firstly, on security - the holiday period is always the busiest time of year for scammers. Please let your staff know to be extra careful when opening emails, especially ‘unexpected’ package delivery notifications, and as always, get in touch with us if anything doesn’t ...

Hi all, The last few monthly emails I’ve been sending out have been dedicated to IT data security - this is and will remain one of the highest priorities. However, there is more to IT than just security! There are a couple of important things I would like to mention this month. Firstly, in regards to Microsoft desktop operating systems. Microsoft will end support for Windows 7 on the 14th of January 2020. This means ...

Hi all, This month has seen another huge spike in data breaches - specifically Office 365 accounts without two factor authentication enabled. These exploits are generally achieved using sophisticated targeted phishing attacks and fake login portals. On that note, I feel it’s time for another security quiz (the last one was very popular)! Point out the difference between these two login pages, and also which one is the real deal - as per the last ...

Hi all, This month I want to talk briefly about spam, scam and other malicious email. Here are some stats of note: 10% of all cases logged in our system in the last month were spam, scam or malicious other email related, more than double any other single issue. It’s great that staff are being proactive with these rather than taking a gamble and clicking links! But also highlights what a problem this really is. ...

Hi all,   As I mentioned in last month’s report, I attended the 2019 AusCERT cyber-security conference where we learnt about current initiatives to help protect your staff and business data.   It made us reflect on our current reporting, in particular, your monthly “traffic light” IT report. When we first developed that report, our intention was to easily highlight the key areas in your IT environment that need your attention.   When we started generating ...

Hi all,   Last week I was lucky enough to attend AusCert 2019, which is one of the biggest IT security conferences in the country. There were plenty of valuable takeaways which we’ll be recommending and implementing over the coming months.   One of the keynote speakers (Mikko Hypponen from F-Secure), who has over 30 years of IT security experience, was asked the question ‘If there’s one thing that anyone can do to be more ...

Hi all, Welcome to April - the days are getting shorter, the mornings are getting colder, and the data breaches are getting more frequent. Coincidence, or something more sinister? In any case, last month I wrote about data breaches at MyFitnessPal and MyHeritage - this month we have 8fit and Houzz - they just keep on coming! And there are many, many more. These are the ones that have affected our client base. We can’t ...

As per Yener Adal's blog post last month, during the month of October, we ran our initial data breach awareness campaign. The results were interesting, disappointing and more than a little concerning - here’s the overview: The initial campaign logged 16% of the currently active accounts in our helpdesk system had a single or multiple data breaches associated with it Of these, we had a 19.88% response rate to the issue, which means almost 20% ...

  Early last week I received a call from a friend who was worried about a scam email he received. Initially, I thought “what’s the big deal?”. How bad can a scam email be? Just mark it as spam, delete it and move on.   He went on to explain that the scam message informed him that they had access to his computer and information on it. They “proved” this by stating they had his ...

Monthly IT Support Update - October 2017 Hi All, This month I’m going to touch on a subject that I’ve written about in the past, unfortunately, the issue isn’t going away and is only getting more sophisticated - that issue is social engineering and it can result in the loss of sensitive information, money, and potentially the reputation of your business. What is social engineering? It manipulating people into performing an action or divulging confidential ...