If you do not know about cyber crime in 2025 then I am not sure where you are living but Cyber crime affects everyone including those of us on the Limestone coast in South Australia, just because we are in a low population area doesn’t mean that you and I are not being targeted by a criminal who would like some of your money – because cyber crime today is about fast transactions and you paying an invoice or a bank account that has been changed to that of a criminals bank account details, as soon as funds hit that account they are immediately used to purchase crypto currency and there forth unrecoverable.
Pretty much every company email address domain has been already harvested because breaches happen from all sorts of platforms and someone from your business used their business email address to sign up.
Protecting yourselves from cyber criminals
I have worked with many small businesses and individuals who have been affected by these invoice frauds and there are some simple steps that you should do to avoid them affecting you and your employees.
The four steps you can do to help reduce risk:
- Implement Multifactor Authentication on all web sites and services that support it, this is where you enter a 4 or more digit number before you are allowed to access your banking for example. This is the Number 1 thing you can do
- Use a password manager and have unique passwords for everything you access that is important like banking and purchasing partners etc: Apple iOS and MacOS, Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Firefox etc all support complex passwords and storing them away for you so that you can easily get access to them when you move to a new device etc.
- Have Anti Virus and Firewall running on all desktop devices, Mobile phones there is less benefit to doing this depending on what sites you frequent.
- Apple and Microsoft Windows both have very good antivirus built in for free, you do not need to pay for AV for personal use.
- If you are a business then you should consider a paid and more extensive Anti-virus (Endpoint Detection and response, Threat and Vulnerability management etc) solution that will extend into areas I won’t cover here.
- Update your software when ever there is an update to be done, even better have “auto-update” turned on so that Windows and macOS as well as your other software is updated whenever there is a patch for it.
These are the basics for everyone, for business there are extras that you want to do and your IT provider can help with this or reach out and we will assist you.
Further Reading
If you are wanting to know if your data (email address or password) has been available for hackers, Troy Hunt has an excellent website here (HaveIBeenPwned) to check either your passwords or email addresses, you can trust him as he is a very well known cyber security researcher – but can you trust me? this is the question you should always ask yourself because scammers are there to rip you off and they really do not care about any one else except their benefit and money that can be taken from you.
I have also written a more advanced cyber security check list at my sister site Kicksec.io where we aim to ensure all Australian business are cyber aware and cyber secure, starting with assessing your risks here against cyber crime and then how to do it here these steps may be too advanced for your business so start with the basics because reducing the cost of implementing better security controls will help your business become less of a target for an attacker.
By the way you can trust the above links, but do some research before trusting anyone online or over Facebook (never ever ever pay a deposit).
Please reach out here if we can assist you
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