By Violet Li
Cranbourne Chamber of Commerce and Neighborhood Watch Casey hosted a free business networking event and a cybersecurity panel on Monday 9 October, aligning with Community Safety Month.
The event helped small and medium business gain insight into the wide issue of what ransomed payouts are used for such as to fund nuclear programs, terrorism, and other foreign activities, how breaches occur and the consequences to a business, and ways to protect and minimise the impact to a business.
President of Cranbourne Chamber of Commerce Ian Wood said the chamber had become increasingly concerned about the rising threat to cybersecurity.
“We want to help local businesses understand and navigate this growing danger,” he said.
“This issue cannot be ignored and so an expert panel was assembled to tackle the problem.”
Cybersecurity expert and managing director of Extreme Networks James Eling attended the event and presented his expertise.
He said it was not only big businesses that were targeted by the potential risk.
“Our small and medium enterprises are political foreign targets, where business data is held to ransom with a goal to illicit funds from victims towards immoral activities and to destabilise economies,” he said.
Cybersecurity tips were delivered at the event, including checking emails carefully to ensure they are legitimate and not clicking on any suspicious links, practising a zero trust approach and always verifying a request or message before acting, keeping your computer and mobile software up to date, backing up data regularly and keeping it offsite, and considering using a password manager rather than a spreadsheet stored on personal devices.
President of Neighbourhood Watch Casey Damien Rosario said it was not a matter of ‘if’ rather a matter of ‘when’ your business would be affected by malicious players.
“We can help mitigate threats with education,” he said.
