Cert NZ report shows Cyber attacks reach record high

Their latest quarterly report shows cybersecurity incidents have reached record levels. The report covering 1st July to 30th September shows Cert NZ received more than 2600 incident reports. This was a 33 percent increase on the second quarter. Direct financial loss was reported at $6.4m 

13 of the reported incidents which provided financial loss details were over $100,000. These included: unauthorised transfer of money after email accounts being compromised, new business opportunities, investment, fake lottery, romance scams and cryptocurrency.   

There had been a 34% increase in malware reports over the previous quarter. A variant of malware called Emotet was responsible for much of this increase.   

The director of Cert NZ also said there have been a recent spate of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, ransomware and online scams. Most of the DDoS attacks overloaded websites with more traffic than they can handle. We looked at one of the high profile incidents in a previous article when the NZX was affected for six days. 

All these show there is not just one cyber attack to protect your system from. Equally there is more than one solution to protect your network from attack. These solutions include but are not limited to MFA, antivirus, firewalls, keeping software updates current and staff security training. Contact our sales team if you would like someone to check that your organisation is implementing current best practices.