MailGuard Blog

A personalised and targeted email, an opportune offer and the impersonation of multiple brands – some of the techniques employed by cybercriminals in a phishing email scam that resulted in a property buyer losing thousands of dollars as part of a ‘deposit’, supposedly for his new apartment.

Your business data is being held hostage, encrypted with only your attackers holding the keys. So, do you pay up the ransom, or try to recover without handing over company profits to cybercriminals?

It’s been called the “largest cyber-attack on a media company in Australia's history," something that has never been seen before in the country. 

Commenting on paradigm shifts in cybersecurity in 2020, Ann Johnson, Corporate Vice President, SCI Business Development at Microsoft wrote: 

“As we look past the pandemic to a time when workforces and budgets rebound, Zero Trust will become the biggest area of investment for cybersecurity. This means, that right now, every one of us is on a Zero Trust journey—whether we know it, or not.” 

In the final weeks of 2020, news of the SolarWinds hack broke – a cyber-attack that has been dubbed as “the Pearl Harbor of American IT”.   

This week marks Identity Theft Awareness Week, a public awareness campaign by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) dedicated to mitigating the impact of identity theft. The week comprises a series of events organized by the FTC and its partners that focus on reducing the risk of identity theft and on concrete steps to recover if identity theft occurs.

Among other things, 2020 reminded us how fundamental cybersecurity is to business continuity.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the need for Australian businesses to step up their efforts in defending themselves from Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks.

One of the biggest challenges in cybersecurity is keeping up with the new attacks that criminals are creating.

In a year gutted by a worldwide pandemic, the 2020 year-end holiday and shopping season will be unlike any other.

Neil Stephenson imagined a meta-verse in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash. A vision of an interactive computer-generated reality or virtual world. A fully immersive persistent experience that we are all plugged into. Maybe we’re not there yet, but we are far closer today than we were pre-pandemic, and it’s a scary peak into the future power that cyber villains may wield.

It’s October again, an important month on the cybersecurity calendar as the world marks Cybersecurity Awareness Month (CSAM).

“Service NSW confirms 180,000 customers' personal details exposed in cyber security breach” 
“A cyber-crime is reported every ten minutes in Australia” 
“NAB flags cyber-attacks during the pandemic have intensified” 

Suzanne Collins, author of the famous trilogy, The Hunger Games, once wrote: “For there to be betrayal, there would have to have been trust first.”  

In a year we would all rather forget; an unfortunate side effect has been a rise in ransomware incidents and opportunistic cyber-attacks. Our current situation has been unexpectedly thrust upon us, forcing a rapid change to our ways of working, and a more vulnerable remote workforce. One positive that’s close to my own heart though, is a growing awareness of cybercrime, and a shared responsibility across the entire organisation from the Board and the CEO, through to the front line, to boost cyber resilience.