Home topics news News Tech News How to be security conscious in your business Rhiannon Sawyer March 4, 2013 While everyone is thinking about BYOD and BYOA in their small business, there are plenty of security issues to be wary of. Robbie Upcroft, SMB sales manager Asia Pacific at McAfee, offers his advice. What’s the most important information in your business? Is it your customer database? Is it your sales figures? Is it the document that keeps all the stored passwords for every computer on the system? Most importantly, how protected is this important information? Every business has files like these, and every business needs to be aware of how attractive these files look to hackers. While deploying viruses that might be randomly downloaded is one way of attacking businesses and individuals alike, a new trend in hacker attacks involves getting into your system, encrypting the data and then ransoming it back to you. This is exactly what happened to one Queensland medical centre that was forced to pay the ransom to recover precious patient files. “As soon as a hacker gets through the desktop they can then access the server and they’re free to go about their business. People are feeling complacent because they’ve got antivirus, they’ve got McAfee on their desktop so they think they’re covered. But what we’ve found is that SMB customers are being targeted by hackers because they don’t have the full suite of security,” says Upcroft. He believes that with the growing use of