Whenever there is a loss of personal information, such as names, date of births, addresses, emails and government identifiers (licence, medicare, passport), there is a risk of identity theft and subsequent fraudulent use.
What is identity theft and its implications?
The above data can be leveraged to impersonate you to access, reset, delete, cancel or provision new services in your name.
The above identifiers can be used over the phone, chat or email to gain to your accounts and services, such as your banking services, internet and phone services as well as utilities or other accounts. Often your passwords are also changed by the criminals which removes your access.
There are many cases where identity theft has resulted in the loss of all money from savings accounts as well new services, such as mobile phones, being provisioned with high costs and bills in the victim’s name.
What does this mean for my business?
In a work sense, this data can be leveraged to access your business envrionment and services through reset passwords, especially through helpdesks or Software as a Service (SaaS) type services like web stores. This can give the criminal access to your customer’s data, payment card data or even company files and email accounts, futher damaging your business through loss of customers, loss of trust and even loss of intellectual property.
The cost to recover from such an incident is often significant enough to force my SMB’s out of business.
The problem is bigger than just the Optus data breach
Optus is just one, albeit very public, breach of information, but there have been over 36 significant/similar data breaches reported to the Australian Privacy Commissioner just this year alone.
This puts your business, your users, and your customers at risk.
What can I do ?
There are things that you can do personally, and as a business, to reduce the risk, and to also make sure your business isn’t also one of the businesses having a data loss event like Optus and the others.
Personal Cyber Security
Small Robot have detailed some steps on our website that you can do to protect your identity and accounts, and we encourage you to share this link and the information with your family and friends to help protect them as well:
Business Cyber Security
From a business perspective, we can work with you to protect your business through a range of practical, effective and cost efficient solutions, often utilising what you already have available today. Please reach out to us if you would like to discuss what we can do for you.
Let's work together to make sure that you are not the next victim of a data breach or cyber crime.