Cyber Security for Small Business - A Personal Reminder.

Last week, I almost fell for a scam that would have drained my bank accounts.

One of my degrees is in computing, and I have grown 7+ technology companies, so you would think I wouldn’t get so far down the scam, but I did.

I was selling some stuff on Gumtree and one item was a baby car seat booster, I was asking $20 for it.

Within 20 minutes of posting the listing someone said they’d buy it but they needed to organise Pack & Send to collect and ship it to him, so he SMSd me a link.

Clicking on it, it looked like the Pack & Send site but when it asked me to login to my bank account, I got suspicious.

Looking at the domain, I twigged - sales-packandsend.com almost looked like the real deal.

Quickly checking when that domain was registered I could see it was only a week ago, so I promptly let the dickhead know he’s a scammer, and reported him to Gumtree.

That, and the 4-5 scammer calls I get a day on my mobile remind me of this risk to my businesses.

And of a story a business mate went through almost 10 years ago.

He had two sites for his business and one of the team clicked on a link they shouldn’t have, and some Russian malware was installed, locked them out of ALL their data and all screens were the instructions to pay $5,000 to have it unlocked.

Having a mate in the cybercrime area for the Federal Police, I put them in touch and he handed them onto the person who specialised in this form of cyber crime.

His advice was “the Russian’s are pretty honourable, just pay it and they will unlock it and move on.”

They didn’t, and instead paid an expert more than $20,000 to no avail.

In the end, they paid the ransom and got back to business.

The scary thing is that that was around 10 years ago - the technology and scams are so much more advanced now, as I experienced last week.

If you haven’t looked at this risk for a while, or at all, speak with your broker about cyber insurance and get some technology and training in place for your team.

The Quick Fire Friday cast that went live this week is with the founder of a cyber security firm here in Australia - they provide “kickass cybersecurity for start-ups and small businesses”.

Love the strapline, and that they focus on the small business niche.

Previously, small businesses weren’t a target for cyber-criminals.

But due to more malicious and financially-motivated attack types, such as ransomware and supply chain attacks, 43% of cyberattacks are now aimed at small businesses - while only 14% of them are prepared to defend themselves, according to Accenture.

Fortunately, there are some simple things that small business owners can do to better protect themselves from cyber attacks.

Including enabling multi-factor authentication in as many places as possible and doing a regular check of internal systems to see who has access to what, so you can remove former staff or those who probably don’t need admin access to everything.

Check out this infographic for more reasons to act on this risk that could undo all the hard work of you and your team in your business.

For more advice, check out Apollo Secure’s blog post “How can Small Businesses protect themselves against Cyber Crime”, and get in touch with Damien and the team.