Weak email laws put consumers at risk
After a couple in the UK was scammed into sending their hard earned house deposit to hackers, the Victorian Commissioner has sent a consumer alert to warn Australians that the same thing could occur here.
As the newlyweds waited on instructions from their lawyers about where to send the deposit, scammers were able to hack the system and impersonate the attorney’s email. They were given a false bank account to send the money to, and the couple ended up losing ₤45,000.
The reason this could happen on home soil too is that currently Australia professionals are not required to use secured email programs.
Despite the fact that issues with this lack of security has been highlighted, it is still the industry standard for legal firms in Australia and the UK not to use secure, encrypted email.
Part of the Victorian Commissioner's alert advises consumers to be wary of links and attachments in emails that are not from known senders. However all of these issues wouldn’t be a problem if the email system was secured.
It seems that the legal industry isn’t overly keen on implementing the security, even going so far as to turn down free offers of encryption software.
The encryption software would give legal companies the security of knowing that their emails could not be tampered with, and the ability to prove that a message is from who it says it is from. The system is quite straight forward, yet no firms have implemented it as yet.
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