Richard Jackson guides us through some common cyber crime definitions and highlights how and why accountants can be at risk.
Richard will be one of the speakers at The Irish Accounting and Tax Summit this year.
If this subject is of interest to you or your colleagues it will be covered in depth along with 15 other Tax and Accounting topics on The Irish Accounting & Tax Summit 2020. You can find more details here.
Transcript of Video – Cyber Crime Definitions
This transcript was created using AI and may contain some mistakes.
I just want to very quickly go through some, some basic crime definitions. So phishing is the most commonly spoken about, uh, and that’s, uh, examples that emails might, might go into your inbox, whether at home or at work fraudulently, attempting to get information out would be well for you to sign up. So, you know, to collect something you shouldn’t collect also happens quite a lot through,
through text and SMS. And then another one, which is whale fishing, which is, which is becoming more common, which is masquerading as a senior player in an organization. It’s also known as CEO fraud. So it’s when you might receive an email, uh, that looks internal and it might have come from your CEO immediately kind of giving you the trust that it must be.
Okay. And we’re going to talk about trust and a bit in a bit more depth, uh, so that there are two common common ones. And we’ll talk about phishing stats in a moment. Malware obviously gets talked about a lot on ransomware as I’ve just been talking about with, with the NHS and, and health. Um, so they’re key to kind of have in mind when I do mentioned any kind of phrasiology,
we need to go back almost 30 years at this point to kind of talk about how all of this has come about, because it’s nearly 30 years since the world wide web became publicly available. Um, they went live, you know, people really didn’t have any idea about the kind of impact of it and how it might be adopted globally. Um, but even within five years,
we were seeing the first fishing attack in 1996, um, in 2001,
when you’re seeing sort of activities like post nine 11 ID checks, people trying to steal information on back of a, of a disaster level event and year on year, cyber crime has escalated. Um, and we’ve got to that kind of early part of the 21st century when it was pretty obvious that for example,
the data protection act of 1998 was woefully out of date in respective of where we were. You had, you know, lots of very public, uh, public newsworthy stories about Facebook and how they were handling data. Um, so, you know, things had to change. It was a little bit of the wild West. Now, why are accountants a relevant tool of this?
Well, basically as the accountancy sector moves towards the adoption of technology, uh, and making life easier for its, for its employees and its clients, it’s kind of at the same time increases its risk. So there’s kind of four main areas really there’s, there’s the mobility. And the fact that accountants are exploiting and mobile technologies to be more productive and efficient,
uh, getting them closer to their clients and staying connected to them wherever they might be a cloud adoption, huge subject for accountants and its own. Right. Um, and I know that in the U S for instance, there’s a lack of trust in cloud. They prefer to have their, their client data on premises. So it’s very different to how we look at data in Europe and cloud,
social collaboration, massive conversations going on in accountancy to see about marketing and the fact that accountants maybe traditionally don’t do marketing and obviously social collaborations, social media is, is how they need to do that in the future? And now, um, and then digital services. So about how accountants using digital services and resources and accessing resources, self service, like portals were for clients to access data or to,
to sign documentation. So all of those, these kind of four areas are the evolution of accountancy, but they’re also bringing the evolution of risk. Um, so if you’re, if you kind of bring in this practice into enter your day to day accountancy function, but not focusing on data security, uh, your risk is going through the roof. Um,
and you need to be thinking about the fact that they, they go together hand in hand. You can’t do one without the other.