Aussie Firms Must Play Catch Up or Will End Up as Easy Targets
- 01 July, 2015 09:31
“This week, it was announced the federal government is putting through a new bill which obliges about 1600 Telco’s and related companies to protect their networks from unauthorised access and interference. Breach notification laws have been highly effective at forcing organisations to review IT Security in countries such as the USA and Europe.
“Australia is behind these aforementioned countries, when it comes to Security, and this is becoming more apparent every day. We hear stories about organisations getting breached by threat actors but the ones we should be concerned about are the ones we are not hearing about.
“As Australia falls behind other countries around IT security, we pull ourselves into attention of the threat actors. Hackers are like water they take the path of least resistance, if threat actors are finding information of value in Australia they are going to do what is necessary to take it.
“We have seen examples of this, such as Chinese hackers steeling intellectual property from manufactures and implementing cheaper ways to produce cheap imitations for sale into other regions .
“We know Australia is a high target. If we look at the cryptolocker breach numbers Australia was ranked 3rd in the globe for number of encrypted devices. We are no longer an Island thousands of miles away. Instead we are a place that can be accessed by a threat actor where Security is not considered a big enough concern.”
Phillip Simpson provides 6 things organisations can do to get be pro-active about security.
1.Test your environment and know your weaknesses so you can fix them, this include policies around IT security
2.Understand the threats and prepare, be pro-active not reactive
3.Understand your access controls and make sure the right people have the appropriate access.
4.Monitor network traffic
5.Have a quality patch management process
6.Train your staff and end users so that they are aware of the importance of IT security
