The National Cyber Security Centre and CERTNZ (Computer Emergency Response Team) release a Quarterly Newsletter detailing statistics from reported incidents during that quarter.
The latest Quarterly Newsletter covering 1 April to 30 June this year makes for Good and Bad reading.
In the last reported quarter, $6.8m in Financial Loss was recorded. This was a slight increase in losses from the previous quarter of $6.6m but is a 61% increase ($4.2m) in losses from the same time last year.
NOTE: This is just the known reported losses, SecureSphere is aware that the vast majority of incidents are not reported and therefore, not recorded, so the losses from these incidents is unknown, but can be guesstimated at.
On the good news side, the number of reported incidents this last quarter was down from the previous quarter (1203 incidents vs 1537 incidents) and are much lower than the same quarter last year which was 1950 reported incidents.
As noted in the Quarterly Newsletter, the majority of the losses were from Unauthorised Access. This shines a light on how damaging and costly Unauthorised Access can be.
So, what can we all do to protect ourselves personally and also protect our businesses and organisations?
The most important and urgent thing we can all do is make sure that we have two-factor authentication (2FA or MFA – Multi-Factor Authentication) turned on for all Online Accounts (eg: Gmail, Outlook.com, Online Banking etc). If you are unsure of how to enable this function, please get in touch with us.
SecureSphere would like to strongly encourage people, businesses and organisations to report incidents of any type to CERTNZ. We can also provide advice on the best ways to secure your Personal Online Account, business or organisation from Unauthorized Access.