The healthcare industry in South Africa comes under no shortage of criticism for many, if not most of its practices and capabilities. All the while, the organisations and people involved move along and try to provide a service to the millions who entrust their lives to these organisations and their staff.

One area of healthcare that is under intense scrutiny internationally is that of data. What happens to patient data, which is potentially one of the most personal and sensitive types of information around? And it’s not only the protection of this data that is under the microscope, the security of healthcare technology, privacy, workflows and processes is also being questioned, especially after the recent global ransomware attacks.

These attacks saw many European healthcare operators being forced to turn people away because their computerised systems were locked down. Depending on where you go for care in South Africa, an attack like this may not impact the operations of health services all that much right now, but the digitisation of healthcare is a reality that all providers need to be aware of, just as they need to be aware of the security implications and demands of digitisation.

Barely a month after the WannaCry outbreak and announcement of Fireball, the globe is under attack once more. The only really exciting part is watching the researchers agree with a name.

I am almost certain you are growing weary of InfoSec professionals knocking at the door, clogging up your feeds and telling you the same thing. If you had patched this or fixed that or prevented these.....

It is not that helpful now. Don’t you hate it when everybody states the obvious? Me too!

The “it won’t happen to me” attitude will not help you either – nobody is immune to attack. The reports are all talking about Ukraine, Europe, India, but we have reports of South African business being hit too. These is not only companies associated with international owners; these are home grown South African businesses. We live and co-exist in a global, connected world.

The reality is that Petya or NotPetya or Goldeneye or whatever you want to call it uses an old vulnerability to spread itself. There are reports of no Command and Control activity and it takes over the Master Boot Record – restarts itself and makes your machine and anything connected it inaccessible. Let us dwell on this for a second, no C&C activity – this is automation of malware delivery. A new variation on an old piece of code.

Following on with my series on cyber threats, I will briefly touch on Whaling Attacks – also known as impersonation attacks. These attacks are on the increase and entail an attacker impersonating a company executive to force an urgent payment out of the business. I think it is valuable to spend a little bit of time discussing the most common methods. Increasing awareness and providing practical methods to defend against these threats can help make sure you are not next.

Our teams have spent quite a lot of time looking at these types of attacks in recent weeks and I would like to take the time to explain how they normally go down and highlight some simple and practical methods to stop them in their tracks.

I often get asked how the would-be attacker gets their information – and the truth is that it is quite easy. You don’t need to search LinkedIn or other social media channels to get the contacts of the right people within the organisation; just pick up the phone. I will explain below.    

In the follow-up to my previous piece on identifying invoice fraud, here I propose a few simple and practical steps to ensure that this does not happen to your business.

Invoice fraud, when a genuine invoice is altered to get a customer to pay for goods or services but into the wrong account, is increasing at a rapid rate, and while it is difficult to trace it is not impossible.

The seven steps are simple and cover training, attention to detail, verification, cross-checking alleged changes, checking for discrepancies, communicating with your suppliers, and managing your environment. Each is discussed in turn.