MailGuard Blog

“Cybersecurity risks are growing, both in their prevalence and in their disruptive potential. Attacks against businesses have almost doubled in five years, and incidents that would once have been considered extraordinary are becoming more and more commonplace.”

On average, 2 Australian companies are being hit by data breach incidents every day, says the first report produced by the newly enacted Notifiable Data Breach (NDB) Scheme.

Of those incidents, nearly half were the result of criminal attacks and the majority were directed at professional services companies in the health, finance and legal sectors.

Will future artificial intelligence be a cybersecurity risk?

That’s the provocative question posed by a new report from Cambridge University’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).  

Several think tanks including OpenAI, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation collaborated with CSER to publish the report warning that AI is set to redefine cybersecurity threats.

If you’re an international criminal selling guns, trafficking dope or running email scams, one of the big problems you’re going to encounter on a regular basis is how to move your money around. A few years ago Bitcoin was the cybercriminal’s favourite means of shifting funds but governments have started to monitor and regulate cryptocurrency now, so it’s not as easy as it used to be. But crooks can always be counted on to find creative ways of moving their money around and the latest racket they’ve come up with involves online computer games.

A lot of people have heard the term “Blockchain” by now and know that it has something to do with Bitcoin and cryptocurrency but Blockchain is more than just crypto, it’s a versatile technology, the applications of which we are only starting to explore.

A computer virus that seeks out and destroys antivirus software; that’s AVCrypt, a new ransomware variant discovered on Friday.

The AVCrypt malware is designed to locate and delete PC antivirus software Windows Defender and Malwarebytes and then install ransomware onto an infected computer. By eliminating the computer’s antivirus programs before beginning the ransomware attack, AVCrypt effectively removes the local security protection that most PCs rely on to prevent such attacks, making this a very dangerous new malware strain.

The biggest challenge in cybersecurity is keeping up with the new attacks that criminals are always coming up with. They’re always looking for new tools and strategies to defraud companies, so we have to be forward-looking in our approach to defence as well.

MailGuard has built its success on being able to respond to new threats ahead of the market and it’s always been our mission to devise better strategies to combat cyber-attacks in real time.

A Ukrainian man, Gennadiy Kapkanov, is currently being held by Ukraine police, accused of internet scamming on a colossal scale. 

Kapkanov stands accused of masterminding the ‘Avalanche’ cybercrime syndicate. Europol reports indicate that at its height, Avalanche racked up cyber-attacks valued at hundreds of millions of dollars in the US and Europe.

In today’s global online marketplace, businesses can find customers, manage workforces and accept payments more easily than ever before and that’s great news, as long as everything works smoothly. 

Friday afternoon at a typical office in Sydney, Australia. Most of the staff have left to start their weekends when a junior accountant sees an email appear in her inbox. She hesitates for a moment but then she notices that it’s from the company’s CEO.

‘Are you still in the office?’ the message reads. ‘Sorry to keep you back on a Friday night, but this is urgent: I need you to make a wire transfer for me immediately in the amount of $45,000 to my broker in London.

The trending data breach story this week is about Retina-X Studios and the embarrassing invasion of their servers by hackers.

Motherboard broke the story 3 days ago about Retina-X losing a terabyte of data stored on cloud servers, and it spread rapidly across the blogosphere.

If you’re looking for some uplifting reading, I would not recommend The Global Risks Report 2018. Published by The World Economic Forum (WEF), this report is a comprehensive examination of all the things that threaten to derail society. Climate change, tidal waves, water scarcity, terrorism; it’s the ultimate ‘worst-case scenario.’ It makes for sobering reading, but of course, the objective of the WEF Global Risks Report is to help economists and businesspeople mitigate risk.

On the scale of potential cyber-threats, who expected a fitness tracking app to create an international security headache?

Strava is a popular app that pairs with wearables like Fitbits and Apple Watches to aggregate exercise data. When you go jogging Strava uses GPS to keep track of where you go.

These are interesting times to be in business. The fastest pace of industrial development in history. Huge opportunities. Huge risks. An economic environment that rewards innovation but is also incredibly volatile.

43% of cybercrime targets smaller businesses; that’s the warning issued in a newly released Australian Government pamphlet.

Published by the ASBFEO (Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman), the pamphlet is titled ‘Get Cyber Secure - Three Quick Steps to Serenity.’ The document is designed to raise awareness of cybercrime and help small businesses achieve better cybersecurity preparedness.