Protect your business
Kia pare i tō pakihi i te atamai hangahanga

Protect your business from artificial intelligence

Taking some simple steps can help to protect your business from risks that come from artificial intelligence.

What it is

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is technology that's designed to do things that normally require human intelligence. AI can be used to scrape public data off your website, or to quickly create believable scams and phishing emails in bulk.

Learn more about artificial intelligence

While AI tools make it easier for scammers, the scams still work the same way. The scams only work if you or your staff provide information, click a link or send the scammers money.

How to protect your business from AI

  • Install software updates

    Keeping your devices and up to date is one of the most effective things you can do to keep your system safe. 

    Install any updates to software and operating systems as soon as they’re available – set your system preferences to install updates automatically if you can. Make sure staff know to do this too.

    Patching advice for IT staff – CERT NZ(external link)

  • Implement two-factor authentication (2FA)

    Implementing means that anyone who logs in to your system will need to provide something else on top of their username and password, to verify that they are who they say they are. You can implement it on internal systems and your customer-facing systems.

    Protect your business with two-factor authentication (2FA)

  • Secure your devices

    Enable anti-malware software on any device that accesses your business data or systems. This includes both company-owned devices and any personal devices your staff use for work.

  • Secure your network

    There are different types of security features you can add to your to filter traffic and restrict access. 

    Firewalls help control where connections go, and proxies can act as an intermediary between different computers or networks. For example, you can use a web proxy to send traffic from your business network to the internet, and it could filter that traffic and prevent any bad traffic – to sites hosting  for example – from getting through. 

    Secure your small business network

Get help

You can report an online issue or security incident like this to us at CERT NZ.

Get help now

CERT NZ’s Insights and Intelligence team produces periodic threat reports to illustrate and identify notable trends in information we collect. This leads to highlighting threats and possible actions or interventions for consideration.

Threat reports – CERT NZ(external link)

CERT NZ is in the process of creating a series of sharable threat reports on AI. 

The use of AI to target regional, culturally significant language groups – CERT NZ(external link)