The World Wide Web is getting more and more dangerous these days making it very difficult and almost impossible for businesses, especially SMEs, to keep their business data safe and secure without the help of a competent IT managed services group in Australia. Last year during the holiday shopping season, payment information stealing malware plagued retailers.
Even fish and chip shops became vulnerable with leaking payment information. Hilton hotel group whose IT systems are protected by managed services team, albeit not within Australia, fell prey to cyber crime that leaked client information like card numbers, card holder information, card expiry dates, and security codes. A rival hotel group, Starwood Hotels and Resorts, was also affected by the same payment information stealing malware after a week.
Just like SMEs and large corporations who employ IT managed services groups in Australia to keep their business information safe, citizens around the globe who do not even use the internet can also be victimized by cyber criminals. Before 2015 ended, more than 190 million personal data of United States voters were leaked and posted on the internet, which is very similar to what just recently happened to the Philippines just two weeks before the national elections. Names, complete addresses, phone numbers, and date of birth were some of the information that was posted online. Can you imagine if all your business information was leaked online?
Envision how your clients and potential consumers would react. You may think that hiring an IT managed services provider in Australia will not guarantee complete safety since these huge conglomerates and supposedly protected government agencies were hacked but that is not the case for SMEs. Cyber criminals are mostly looking for easy targets so if they fail to breach your system after a couple of tries, they would move on to the next one. They would even check which managed services team in Australia protects and fortifies your systems before they even exert any hacking effort. Not having IT managed services protection in Australia is like being a sitting duck on the middle of the cyber highway.
Cyber criminals even target those who area already physically vulnerable. Earlier this year, a hospital in the United States paid the ransom amount of $17,000 USD to be able to regain access to their medical records, after they were locked out by a cyber attack earlier this year. Local cyber criminals have been targeting tax time refunds and up to 500 Australian tax file numbers and pertinent information are being hacked every day. These hackers have breached company payroll systems collecting personal information of thousands of Australian workers and used their details to file fraudulent tax returns. These breaches could have been prevented by a reliable IT managed services in Australia that has a proactive maintenance approach because they would have been able to detect any system anomalies with 24/7 real-time monitoring.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) issued a warning earlier this month regarding transferring funds and handing over business information via e-mail due to a global boost in the number of spear-phishing attacks focused mainly in victimizing businesses. A certain number of employees have been duped by scammers who pretend to be senior managers. The ACCC adds that these business email scams are claiming many victims in Australia monthly with losses to up to $50,000 every month. If your company enlists the help and protection of an IT managed services group in Australia and you have VoIP or Cloud systems in place then it would be very easy for you and employees to verify the authenticity of email communications and it would be very easy to do a voice or video call to double check such fund transfer requests and other information.
As of today, companies and even government agencies in Australia are not legally required to disclose that their IT managed services in Australia have encountered a breach. A bill proposed by the Turnbull government last December 2015 is still under way and if the bill is passed, it will require businesses and all types of organizations to publicly announce security breaches within a 30 day period of the incident. Would you want your company to be put through such embarrassments? It is definitely more than just saving face because if you do not have a dependable IT managed services team in Australia that greatly diminishes the chances of being vulnerable to these kinds of cyber attacks, your company will also suffer from loss of patrons and a huge drop in income.
