The consumer watchdog has shed some light on a computer virus that affected several Horsham businesses earlier this week, and offered some advice on how to avoid them in the future.
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On Tuesday, several businesses began receiving emails claiming to be from home improvement store Wades, with a link to file-sharing website Dropbox.
Andrea Cross, Horsham Agricultural Society's venue manager said she opened the email while scrolling through her inbox on the first day back from break.
“I like to think I’m fairly tech-savvy and am fairly aware of scams, but I guess I just had so much on my plate to catch up on," Mrs Cross said.
"I clicked on it, downloaded the Dropbox file, which didn’t appear to be too out of the ordinary."
“I left it while it was downloading and did some more work, basically forgot about it – then I was reading facebook last night and saw the virus alert.
“So I raced down to work, picked up my laptop and sure enough it was there on my page. At this point in time it doesn’t look like there has been any damage, except for when I went to the website of our bank, it was full of pages and pages of metadata, so clearly there had been some activity there.
“Fortunately when I went home I checked my personal computer with the bank website and there was nothing sinister.”
Business Horsham Executive Administrator Sarah Kelm said she had noticed a spike in the number of scams in the region over the past few months.
“Any scam I see I send an alert out to our members, and I always seem to get a lot of feedback,” Ms Kelm said.
“Scams have been going for some time, but they are getting cleverer and more intense(and) unfortunately if you run a busy business and you’re time-poor, it’s easy for things to slip through.”
Ms Kelm said Business Horsham had sent out information to members about how to register for the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission’s Scamwatch service.
Wades was contacted but preferred not to comment.
The ACCC told the Mail-Times this was what is known as a ‘Business email compromise scam’.
“A hacker gains access to a business’s email accounts, or ‘spoof’ a business’s email so their emails look legitimate and appear to come from the company,” a spokeswoman said.
The representative also said these scams can target all kinds of businesses, and suggested Wimmera enterprises invest in the latest anti-virus and anti-spyware software to ensure their IT security was up to date.
Alexander Darling
Alexander has been a member of the Wimmera Mail-Times' editorial team since December 2018, covering politics, business and property among other rounds. He is a passionate St.Kilda and rock and roll fan, and has previously worked as a radio reporter in Port Macquarie and Gosford, NSW.
Alexander has been a member of the Wimmera Mail-Times' editorial team since December 2018, covering politics, business and property among other rounds. He is a passionate St.Kilda and rock and roll fan, and has previously worked as a radio reporter in Port Macquarie and Gosford, NSW.
