Transform Masters 2017 is brought to you with thanks to our sponsors Property Tree, realestate.com.au and Real+
This week, nationally, it is Stay Smart Online Week (9-13 October 2017). Protecting yourself and your business has never been more important so we asked REA Group’s head security coach Craig Templeton to join us for a series of videos about how you can protect your personal and business assets from cyber-criminals.
REA Group’s Small Business Security Guide for Australian Real Estate Agents is available for download here.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Privacy is something that really touches everybody. It’s one of those things where, quite often, that you don’t appreciate it until you think you’ve lost it. And I think that, as custodians of other peoples’ information, we are also customers of other businesses as well, so, for me as a business, I’d be definitely wanting to keep the information that I hold custodianship of as safe as I possibly can, because I know that when I hand my information over to somebody else I want them to also treat that with respect as well. And the fact is that, in the digital world now, information is used to access all sorts of services, but obviously, if that gets compromised then somebody else can effectively take goods and services out in your name. Knowing who has access to your data allows you to start managing the risks and start implementing protections in that.
One of the biggest things that I see, is actually when somebody leaves an organisation that people forget to remove the access to information, which means that they’ve gone off somewhere else but they still have access to that data. Now sometimes people tend to go well, there’s a bit of a client base here maybe I’ll just bring that with me, you know, after all I did the work, and therefore, I can use that at my next job. But effectively that information belongs to that agency and they’re really entrusted with protecting that as well. So knowing who’s got access to information and making sure that you revoke access when somebody leaves the organisation is probably the number one thing that you can do to protect the privacy.
When it comes to public wifi, effectively what you’re doing is you’re logging in to a computer that somebody else owns, so you’ve literally got no idea who can see that information and where that’s going. So my advice to people using public wifi is just to treat it as any kind of public space, treat it with caution. I would avoid even using things like email, because effectively, you have to pass a credential, which is like your password and username across your internet provider, which then goes into email provider and that’s being transmitted. So if that isn’t encrypted, which sometimes it isn’t, that means that potentially somebody could actually see what that is and then get access to your email, start resetting some passwords and then you could be in a bit of trouble.
