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E Security
Sunday, 14th June 2009
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Last week was national E-Security week here in Australia. All around the nation, events were held to educate users in the digital economy about the importance of personal digital security - as it is an area that very few people care about, but a lot of people need to start thinking about it. To give you an idea of what it is all about, here are my speech notes from the E-Security event in Darwin that I MC’d at last Wednesday.
Ladies and Gentleman, good evening and welcome to this presentation on E-Security presented by Symantec in conjunction with the Australian Government and the Northern Territory Government. My name is AJ and I’m a Technology Coach and I’ll be your host for today’s function. Firstly a few housekeeping rules. If you have a mobile phone, please switch it off as we’ve got some IT people here in the crowd and we’ve developed as special mobile phone virus that will infect your phone. Toilet’s and fireescapes are around here somewhere...well here’s one...and I’m guessing the toilets are outside. Ahhh I’m sooo not an MC! But going back to what I normally do...I’m a Technology Coach and I work with Small to Medium sized businesses and help them overcome their business challenges using technology. I see and hear so many stories about a lack of security in business today and yet no one really does anything much about it these days - unless something bad happens.
For those of you in the room today that have lived in Darwin a very long time, you’ll remember those good old days when you used to leave your doors unlocked at night, or not have any fences or gates on your property. These days it’s quite a different story isn’t it? I see so many people who are worried more about getting insurance rather than setting up basic security in their office. And then there is the classic case of people going out and buying a new car - say a ferrari or a porsche, and then protecting their new “asset” with the latest security including anti theft devices such as car alarms with ultrasonic sensors and satelite tracking devices...yet they don’t have an anti-virus program on their laptop. What is going on??? Then there’s the popular social networking sites such as Facebook and Myspace and what not. We don’t think twice to tell the whole world what we are doing and where we’re going and who we’re going with, but maybe we should start to be a little bit more careful.
Times have indeed changed.
(Notes from Symantec with ad-libs)Each year Australians are putting more and more information online through business and financial transactions and social interaction. As the number of Internet users and the volume of information increases, the need for better online security becomes increasingly important. For example, according to the ABS around 70 percent of Australian households have some Internet access at home and the number has quadrupled in the 10 years between 1998 and 2008. The ACCC also advises that more than 6 million Australian are exposed to a range of global scams each year, with over 800,000 falling victims in some way. WOW! That works out to be...4 in 30 people that have been scammed. Now, looking around the room today, there’s 30 of you in here...so I want to know which 4 of you got scammed! Only kidding...we’ll work that out during the networking session!!! Losses from and mail and internet fraud, fake lotteries and pyramid schemes, identity theft, phishing and other scams are estimated to generate losses of over $1 billion a year in Australia alone.
This week is National E-Security Awareness Week - an Australian government initiative - that aims to educate and promote awareness with consumers and small businesses about how to stay safe online. As part of this week, The NT government together with the Australian government and Symantec has joined together to host this event and I’m sure you’ll find it to be a very informative session.
Our speaker for this evening is Steve Martin, now when they told me that I’d be introducing Steve Martin, I got VERY excited. I loved him in 3 Amigos!!! I’m dying to find out what Chevy Chase is like!!! But alas...it wasn’t the same Steve Martin. But I tell you what. This guy is a legend too! Steve is the Director of the Small and Medium Business for Symantec in Australia and New Zealand. Steve has more than 25 years experience in the IT industry, including 5 years at Symantec and before joining Symantec worked for 11 years at Novell in a variety of Asia Pacific and Australian roles. Symantec is the world’s leading security company protecting information for more than 250 million customers globally and millions of businesses – both large and small and consumers. Symantec has a strong presence in Australia and a global intelligence network that provides a useful insight into online threats. Steve will be sharing some of the most recent insights with us this evening and will also discuss some of the ways you can protect your business.
So without further adeu, ladies and gentleman...STEVE MARTIN!!!!!!!!!!!
* * * * * * *
Steve’s speech was great and he did a fantastic job of portraying boring old numbers in a meaningful and entertaining way to really drive home the point that people need to start paying attention to their digital security. He spoke about the underground digital information economy where information scammed or extracted from your pc is sold and traded much like stocks and shares. I wrote about this briefly last year when Robert Lowe came up from AusCert. It’s facinating stuff. Steve also had a photo of one of the scammers and his job title was “Computer Virus Broker”. Man I thought I had a cool job title!!! At the end of his presentation Steve gave everyone some useful tips on how to stay safe online. Three big tips that I took away from it were -
1. Patch all of your software with the latest updates because there are millions of people out there in the world going through pieces of software and trying to find holes in which to exploit them.
2. If you have a lot of passwords, then put them in a password vault and then you only have to remember the password to your vault
3. Always be in control of where you are going on the internet. Just like in real life you wouldn’t walk down certain streets at night, well that’s the same way you should view things on the internet. There are certain places that you shouldn’t go - so be in control of where you are going. This refers to those links that you get in email. It’s quite easy to type something and then include code behind the scenes so that even when the link says “www.hotmail.com” it might take you to another fake hotmail site. This is becoming more and more apparent in those clever fake emails that come from banks that ask you to click here to authorise your account details. Always be in control of where you go - type in the addresses mannually!
And there you go, all about e-security in a nutshell. If you would like to find out more about E-Security, then visit the Australian Government Website on E-Security - http://www.staysmartonline.gov.au/
Also, for those of you who like a bit of adventure, the people who developed our training curriculum for the TTIs - Micro Enterprise Acceleration Institute (MEA-I), have developed a special online game on E-Security called Get Security. In the game, you play David, a young entrepreneur who runs his own events management company. During the game, you have to work through the day to day tasks as David, but during each task you have to think about how to remain secure. For instance, if you receive an email, you need to scan the email first before downloading it. If you don’t, 2 minutes into the game it will stop and tell you that you’ve failed. It’s EXCELLENT!!! So check it out here.
So this week I challenge you to think about everything you do on your PC and ask yourself if what you are doing poses any security risk. Normally the answer to this is “who cares!” but remember there are millions of people out there who would love to get their hands on your personal information. Even if they don’t think that information is useful to them, they know someone whom they can sell that information to. So start being smart online. Can you afford not to?
Dream, Build, Inspire, Lead!
AJ~
Author: AJ Kulatunga
Category:
build, e security, symantec, steve martin, online security, staysmartonline, threats, scams, fraud, pyramid schemes, phishing
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