Cyber Security & Managed IT for Perth Financial Services

What We See in Perth Financial Services Environments

FAQ

Why Perth financial services firms are a deliberate target

If you hold an AFSL or run a financial planning, broking, or wealth advisory practice in Perth, you sit on exactly what attackers want: verified client identity documents, bank details, tax file numbers, and the authority to move money. A 5-50 staff firm in the CBD, West Perth, or out in Subiaco is often a softer target than the big institutions, because the data is just as valuable but the defences are usually thinner. The most common entry point is not a sophisticated hack. It is a planner or paraplanner clicking a convincing email, or a credential that already sits in a breach database from an old LinkedIn or MyFitnessPal leak, reused on a Microsoft 365 login.

The reality for WA firms is that ASIC now treats cyber resilience as a direct AFSL obligation, not an IT afterthought. Your obligation to have adequate resources and risk management arrangements includes the systems holding client data. When a breach happens, the question is not just "what did it cost" but "can the firm demonstrate it had reasonable controls in place". For a small Perth practice without documented evidence, that conversation with ASIC and with the OAIC under the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme is the part that does lasting damage.

How it actually goes wrong, and what it costs you

The scenario we see most often is invoice and payment redirection fraud. An attacker watches a compromised mailbox quietly for weeks, learns how your firm phrases settlement instructions and rollover requests, then sends a client a message from your real domain asking them to update the account their funds are going to. Because the email genuinely comes from your firm, your client trusts it, and the money is gone before anyone notices. For a financial services business, that is not just a loss; it is a client whose retirement savings were redirected on your watch.

The damage rarely stops there. A firm in this situation typically faces an OAIC notification, a scramble to work out which clients were exposed, professional indemnity and cyber insurers asking what controls were in place, and weeks where advisers are answering anxious calls instead of writing advice. Trust is the entire product in this industry. We have seen the practical cost play out as lost referral relationships, a frozen mailbox during the busiest part of the financial year, and a director personally fielding questions from a licensee or dealer group about whether the firm is still fit to operate.

How COREWEST closes the gaps, Microsoft-first

Most Perth financial services firms already run Microsoft 365. The problem is almost never the platform; it is that the security controls inside it were never switched on or properly configured. We work through your existing tenant and harden it with the tools you are already paying for:

• Defender for Office 365 inspects inbound mail for the impersonation and payment-redirection attacks that target advisers, and quarantines the convincing fakes before a paraplanner ever sees them.
• Entra ID with Conditional Access and MFA stops a breached password from becoming a breached mailbox. A sign-in from an unexpected location or unmanaged device gets challenged or blocked, which is what neutralises the credential-reuse attacks that start most incidents.
• Microsoft Defender and Intune secure the laptops your advisers use at client meetings and from home, so a lost device or an unpatched machine does not become the way in.
• Purview classifies and tracks sensitive client data across SharePoint, Teams, and email, so you can see where TFNs and identity documents actually live and prove who has access to them.
• Microsoft 365 Backup means a ransomware hit or a mistaken deletion does not erase your client files, with a verifiable recovery point rather than a hope.

We also fix the email spoofing problem at its root by configuring SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correctly on your domain, so an attacker cannot send messages that appear to come from your firm to your own clients.

Compliance, evidence, and what your insurer will ask

When you renew cyber and professional indemnity cover, the insurer's questionnaire now asks specific questions: do you enforce MFA on all accounts, are backups tested, is email filtering in place, who has administrative access. Answering "yes" without evidence is how claims get disputed later. We document the controls in plain English so you have a clear record of your security posture to put in front of an insurer, a licensee, or ASIC if asked. That is the difference between cyber being a vague worry and being a managed, demonstrable part of how your firm runs.

This matters because financial services compliance is increasingly board-level. A director who can show that identity, email, endpoints, and backup are all configured and monitored is in a completely different position from one who assumed the IT was "fine" because nothing had gone wrong yet. We are a Perth-based team, evidence-led, and Microsoft-first; we show you what is actually exposed rather than waving certificates around. No lock-in, month to month.

If you want to know exactly where your firm stands, the quickest first step is a Free Cyber Risk Snapshot. In 30 minutes we show you what is exposed from the outside, in plain language, with no obligation. Book it at calendly.com/corewest/30min.