Cybercrime 'real' threat to NZ businesses

PricewaterhouseCooper's Global Economic Crime Survey 2011 has recently been released and is available for download. 

The bad news?

"...almost 50% of New Zealand respondents said they had suffered some form of economic crime in the previous 12 months"

This was up from 42% in the last survey in 2009. New Zealand also ranked 4th (out of 78 countries) for levels of reported fraud.

A recent opinion-piece in the Press from Colin Slater, Partner at PwC New Zealand, focusses on the growing threat from cybercriminals.

"...of the one in two New Zealanders who say they were a victim of fraud in the past year, a quarter were subjected to one or more cybercrime-related issues."

Slater points out that close to 40% of business people have had no cyber security training in the last year and that 34% stated that their businesses had no in-house capability to detect or prevent such incidents.

While the threat from cybercrime is very real, it is important to remember that the real vulnerabilities lie not with a company's firewalls or anti-virus protection, but the individual employees themselves.

We at Cabal Investigations can assist your business counter the growing threat of economic crime. Please contact us, in confidence, for further details.

Significant quakes hit Christchurch

Christchurch has been hit by several significant quakes, measuring up to 6.0, on Friday 23 December with a number of lesser aftershocks continuing to be felt throughout the area. No fatalities have been reported and while power to a number of houses in the eastern suburbs was lost, services remain mostly unaffected.

Call us on 0800 366 989 if you have any URGENT requirements.

Corporate Counter-Espionage

One area of particular interest to us at Cabal Investigations is that of Corporate or Industrial Espionage inside New Zealand. While, at face value, it seems unlikely that businesses here are at risk, the reality is significantly at odds with this perception.

If your company possesses proprietary information (such as sensitive financial data, specific trade processes, research reports, and various intellectual property etc) that is not in the public domain, then there is a very real risk to you.

Cabal Investigations has recently become involved with several  local SMEs who had become victim of Corporate Espionage. The financial loss to each business, while difficult to quantify, probably ran to the millions of dollars.

In the case of Company A, a highly trusted manager had, over the course of several months, been copying sensitive documents which he provided to a local competitor. This had an immediate effect on national sales as the competitor had access to client lists, pricing information, tender applications, and cost of manufacturing.

In Company B, an employee stole their entire client database which was provided to a new startup company (headed by a relative of the employee), allowing the start-up to directly approach Company B's current clients.

We believe that Corporate Espionage is a widely misunderstood and generally under-reported phenomenon in New Zealand and seek to provide specific Counter-Espionage Services including;

• Vulnerability Assessment / Threat Identification
• Covert Physical and Technical Surveillance operations
• Forensic data examination & analysis
• Technical Surveillance Countermeasures (ie 'debugging')
• Counter-surveillance operations
• Anti-surveillance training

We are able to provide these services throughout New Zealand (and to NZ businesses abroad).

If you have any concerns, contact us on 0800 366 989.