This week your committee came in early on a frosty morning to clean out the club’s storage cupboard. It has built up over time and disposal of much of it was well over due.
Our featured speaker this week was new member Peter Gray (VK3…) who is an experienced cyber security professional.
Peter talked about how hacking and the various attacks to get our data or more directly money, is now an international business run by organisations that have sales and technical support departments.
Attackers sometimes gain access to otherwise secure environments through the weakest link which could even be the internet of things sensors for heating and air-conditioning.
Poison web pages are often promoted by coming up in web searches or even in ads on the platforms. If you get an email from, say, your bank, don’t click the link – go to the site in your browser the way you normally do.
Having your email compromised is a terrible life event that can take a long time to recover from. Passwords should be strong, unique and long. Peter suggests at least 10 characters long. We should all be using a password manager that creates and remembers a different random long password for each site.
Be suspicious of messages – again never click links in them.
Set up two factor authentication but be aware that using SMS as the second factor is not the best idea due to the possibility of someone taking over your phone number via SIM swapping.
Other precautions include keeping software up to date, using antivirus software and on Windows not logging in for daily use as administrator.
Back up regularly and keep the back up off line. Check that you can restore from a backup.
It was a fascinating and professionally presented talk. Peter has a website that offers consulting services at https://www.itsafe.com.au/cyber.html