Happy New Year! I hope you had a great Christmas break and managed to find some time to go offline and bask in the sunshine.
Whilst most Kiwis will have been enjoying some family time over the last few weeks, it seems that cybercriminals don't take holidays if you caught the news in late December when the TAB website was targeted by a DDoS attack and staff spent 3 days battling internet outages.
TAB executive general manager Glenn Patrick was quoted in the Herald as saying " I guess it's just part and parcel of the world we now live in unfortunately."
A Dour December
December is traditionally a quieter month at NetSafe as 2700 schools wind down and Kiwis
prepare for and enjoy the long holiday break. But whilst we only logged 465 incident reports during the month - less than half our May 2014 figures - reported losses reached $1,550,500 with romance, small business and investment scams taking their toll on internet users.
Incident reports continued to be received at NetSafe during the holiday period including on Christmas Day itself and we ended 2014 having recorded a total of 8061 incidents across a range of digital challenges with losses totaling $7,984,300.
If you're still in the mood for making resolutions, read on below for more tips on how to improve your online safety and security in 2015.
2015: New scams and security issues?
We're less than two weeks into the new year but the NetSafe helpline and online ORB reports have been busy already and Banking Ombudsman Deborah Battell "predicts complaints to her office about scams will increase this year", issuing guidance on how to avoid getting caught out.
At the end of last week, Detective Clifford Clark, the officer in charge of the Police National Cybercrime Centre also issued a warning to the media about 'revenge porn' extortionists.
It was reassuring to read that "Police had hired more staff to sleuth the cyberworld because of increasing public demand."
Please do share this email with friends and family so they can protect themselves online.
Chris Hails
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