Client Cyber Alert

Dear Clients and Colleagues,

There has been an increase in security breaches targeted at clients of law practices across Australia. We are taking urgent and serious action to ensure all necessary precautions are taken to protect our systems from being intercepted by malicious parties and to preserve your confidentiality.
To protect yourself and your funds, we make the following recommendations:

1. When transferring any money to our firm, or receiving money from our firm, always contact us by telephone to verbally confirm our account
   number, details and amounts by reading out and reading back the account and BSB numbers.
   We will not transfer money out of our practice until we are able to verify any bank account by a voice call to confirm those details (by reading out and reading back the account and BSB numbers). Please make sure you can be contacted if you need any funds transferred by a specific time.
2. Be aware that a telephone number within an email purporting to be from our office may be the telephone number of a malicious party.
   Therefore ensure that you do not contact us using that phone number, without first checking the phone number in a prior separate paper communication from us or checking our official website or white or yellow pages telephone listing.
3. Treat all emails that appear to be from this practice with a due sense of caution. This applies to emails that that appear to be from any other
   parties that may be involved in any matters that you may presently have with our practice.
4. Further precautions you can take are:

• • If you have communicated financial information/banking details to us via email, inform your financial institution that your details may
    have been viewed/accessed. Check and monitor your bank statements for any unusual transactions and report any unusual transactions;
  • If you have communicated identification information with us via email, you may wish to consider contacting a credit reporting agency to
    monitor/check for unauthorised transactions in your name;
  • Log out devices and change your passwords;
  • Refer to our insurer’s advice “Client Cyber Alert” found under the heading ‘General of the Resources tab on our website;
  • If you have an IT Advisor you may also wish to advise them of the possible risk and ask for assistance.

We are taking the issue of potential cyber breaches very seriously and have engaged appropriate professionals to investigate any possible breaches to our systems, as part of our continuing commitment to protecting and securing our IT systems and preserving your confidentiality.

Yours faithfully,

Hede Bryne & Hall