Businesses, individuals urged to adopt cyber risk mitigation strategies
Imagine you are the CEO of a medium-sized professional services firm offering tax advice to thousands of Australian individuals, families and small businesses. You’re enjoying movie night at home on a Saturday; a rare moment of calm after a busy week.
As you settle in for the evening, your phone rings. It’s your IT manager, who usually sends emails. Oh dear, this can’t be good.
Your business is under a malware attack. The criminals have accessed the names, contact details, account statements, driver’s licence numbers, passport and tax file numbers, credit card and bank account details of your 7000 clients.
In another house, not far away, another family is settling in for the evening. Mum and dad are washing up, while in the next room, the home computer is hacked and all the family photos and home movies have been encrypted.
Dedicated cyber insurance provider Emergence Insurance offers protection against the severe financial, commercial and reputational risks posed by cyber threats.
Both these incidences are examples of cybercrimes, which are crimes involving technology such as a computer, tablet or mobile phone. Unfortunately, these two scenarios are all too common, as the latest cybercrime statistics show.
When it comes to personal cybercrime, according to the Australian Institute of Criminology’s Cybercrime in Australia 2023 report, 47 per cent of people who responded to its cybercrime survey had experienced at least one cybercrime in the previous 12 months.
From a business perspective, the latest data from the Australian Cyber Security Centre indicates that for the 2021-22 financial year, the centre received more than 76,000 cybercrime reports. This equates to a report every seven minutes, a rise of nearly 13 per
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