Fraud Awareness Week begins

As part of the Fraud Awareness Week, the New Zealand Bankers' Association offers the following advice for customers to help by:

• not giving PIN numbers or internet banking usernames or passwords to anyone.
• keeping anti-virus and firewall software up to date.
• logging on to internet banking by typing in the bank's full web address and not using links that appear to take them to the bank's website.
• checking they have a secure connection, which is shown by a padlock symbol somewhere on the page, and that the website address starts with "https://".
• not using public computers in internet cafes, libraries or hotels for internet banking.
• only providing information such as their date of birth, address, driver's licence number and passport details to trusted people and organisations. 

The rest of the article can be read on Stuff here.

Now that Valentine's Day is over, let the affairs begin

It would seem that if your partner was less than enthused with your Valentine's Day offerings, there is a higher probability that they will initiate an affair the day after on online dating sites.

AshleyMaddison.com, a site specifically catering for those looking for extramarital trysts, reports a 252% increase in signups on February 15.

Do you suspect your partner is having an affair? Call us on 0800 366 989 today.

Travelling to China on business?

When Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, travels to that country, he follows a routine that seems straight from a spy film. 

He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings “loaner” devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.” 

What might have once sounded like the behavior of a paranoid is now standard operating procedure for officials at American government agencies, research groups and companies that do business in China and Russia — like Google, the State Department and the Internet security giant McAfee. Digital espionage in these countries, security experts say, is a real and growing threat — whether in pursuit of confidential government information or corporate trade secrets. 

“If a company has significant intellectual property that the Chinese and Russians are interested in, and you go over there with mobile devices, your devices will get penetrated,” said Joel F. Brenner, formerly the top counterintelligence official in the office of the director of national intelligence. 

(Read rest of article by Nicole Perlroth at the New York Times)

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.