DON’T DO YOUR TAX RETURN ON WORK LAPTOP
TAX and cyber security experts have warned Australians to stay off work devices, and public wi-fi, while doing their personal tax returns and banking to avoid being scammed.
Data from the Norton Lifelock Tax Time survey obtained by News Corp Australia found 41 per cent of Australians do their personal tax matters on their work devices – including phones, laptops and tablets – because they think it is more secure.
Among Generation Z (aged 18-24), 58 per cent use their work device, while 50 per cent of Millennials (age 25-30) use their work device. Almost a quarter of Baby Boomers (age 50-64) think the same.
It comes as one in 10 workers said they had shared their tax return using public wi-fi or using a hot spot via a friend.
Senior director of the Consumer Business Unit at Symantec Mark Gorrie told News Corp that while using a work device on the go was more convenient, it carried risks.
“Scammers can hack a person’s data in seconds as soon as it is transmitted on an open network,” he said.
“Network monitoring software can be cheap and it enables you to see all the connections and traffic flowing through an open (public wi-fi) network, and scammers can even redirect people to different sites if they want.
“A tax return has a lot of personal information like a name, address, phone number, tax file number, bank details, health insurance details … that’s enough for a cyber criminal to create 80 per cent of a profile on you and then target you with specific email phishing scams.”
H&R Block’s tax communications director Mark Chapman said that while 74 per cent of Australians still used a tax agent, those who did their own tax could be “careless”.
“The only free time they have to do their tax may be in the lunch hour or before they start work and they don’t think about security,” he said.