Be cyber-vigilant

Whoever is detected in a shameful fraud is ever after not believed even if they speak the truth

Open the Money/Personal Finances section of any Saturday or Sunday newspaper, and there’ll be an article about fraud. Increasingly though, it’s not big budget company fraud, where insiders deal secrets and scam the company for billions, before heading off on the run, a la Nick Leeson.

Instead, more and more it’s the smaller stuff, where someone has, in their haste clicked on a link in an email, or fallen for a website address that’s nearly, but not quite right.  Obviously, there’s the stereotypical phishing email from a deposed foreign prince who requires nothing more than your open heart and your open bank account to allow them to recapture their confiscated fortune. There is a very good book about this, by the way, Keanu Reeves Is Not In Love With You: The Murky World of Online Romance Fraud, by Becky Holmes, (buy it here , not on Amazon https://unbound.com/books/keanu)

Some of these scams are so obvious, and you wonder how on earth people fall for them. But fall for them they do. Then there are the ones that are rather more sophisticated, where the fraudsters have gone to great deal of trouble to impersonate official-looking websites. I had one a few weeks ago, telling me that the payment for my TV licence hadn’t gone through. It was a really good copy of the official site, with the right logos and phone numbers. Had I not known perfectly well that I’d already paid it sometime before, I might have been sent into a panic, clicked on the link and had by bank account emptied. Not that they’d have got away with very much, in fact any scammers actually getting that far would probably feel sorry for me and put it all back.

I’ve also had  a few  WhatsApp messages that start ‘Mum. It’s me. Hope you are well, my phone is broken, could you please text me back on this new number’. Obviously, those are fraudsters, as they don’t realise that my children would never, ever be that polite to me.

There’s a government-sponsored campaign trying to get people to stop and think carefully before they respond to unsolicited messages, whether that be supposedly from the Royal Mail, your bank, your credit card company, or anyone else who you might have a commercial relationship with.  Or, in the case of those who work in the heart of Westminster and really, you’d like to think, should know better, from someone who is claiming to be a former colleague, who then starts sending you “unsolicited images of a pornographic nature” as the BBC tactfully put it.

Seriously though, cyber security is a big thing at the moment, and not just for our personal finances. Almost a third of small businesses reported a breach or attack, 59% of medium-sized businesses and 96% of large businesses reported a cyber security risk in the last 12 months.

All this is a rather meandering way of highlighting the news that hit my desk today, that NMBS has achieved Cyber Essentials Plus, which is a government-backed programme run by the National Cyber Security Centre that helps to protect organisations against a range of the most common cyber-attacks

NMBS says working through the scheme has also helped it to enhance certain areas of the IT systems including firewalls, secure configurations, access control, malware protection and security patch management. When you think of the amount of sensitive financial information that regularly gets passed through cyberspace between suppliers and merchants, you realise that cyber-vigilance is more vital than ever. In fact, NMBS’s CEO Chris Hayward wrote about this issue a while ago here  (See, this blog isn’t all about me, me, me)

As technology and our personal and business lives become more and more entwined, so there are ever-increasing ways that we can be parted from our money, our private information and, if Westminster is anything to go by, it seems, our sense.