Jan Thornborough

Do your own due diligence and make sure that they have got the right levels of security in place to protect your customers, your patients' information.

It took me a while to actually let my practice have my information.

I wouldn't do it when they had the first iteration of their tool.

And even the second one, I was a bit reluctant to.

But I've seen, to be honest, I have seen behaviours that concern me.

And unfortunately, because everyone is going digital and everything's online, it's very hard to stay in the old way of doing things these days.

You have to kind of just take a leap and hope

hope that it's going to be okay.

I think it probably would be equal in terms of the damage it might do to an individual in terms of threatening them or ransoming them or even just fooling them into clicking on something and giving away their credentials.

Because once they do that, then the hacker can get into the system and get into everything that they've been looking at or any other.

applications and they can see any saved passwords they might have saved in their browsers and things like that.

So I think banking is probably a bit better protected than the health sector at the moment, but definitely I think they're equal in terms of value to the hackers.

Well, hopefully you've got an IT provider.

If you haven't, you need to actually know who can help you.

So if you are a nationally significant organisation, if you're a large health organisation, for example, you can call the National Cyber Security Centre.

they have an incident response line.

And if they can't help you, they can certainly tell you where to get help from someone else.

There are some really good, reputable cybersecurity firms in New Zealand that can come and lend support.

If it's a fraud or you're being extorted, you can contact the police.

If you don't have any IT provider, it can be a bit challenging if you're just an individual sole trader in practice.