How can we help you?

Via email. We will never put your staff’s personal details in the email – it will just be an alert asking them to quickly log in and see what is going on. And then we can work together on ways to stop your identity being compromised any further.

Beyond our welcome email – your staff will only receive an alert if their data is being compromised. We don’t know when crooks will be acting. That’s why we watch everything all the time.

No, there is a limit to the amount of items you can monitoring under the ID Basic service. For details on how many items you can monitor through the Identity Watch feature please see our Equifax ID Basic product page. 

Your staff details are monitored 24/7. If any information is found to be compromised we will send an alert straight away.

Once your staff have registered the personal information you would like monitored by Identity Watch it takes 12–24 hours for us to carry out the initial scan. We’ll send your staff an email after the first scan is done and let you know what we found.

No. Only your staff will receive an email alert. Your staff then have to log on to the portal – see what’s happening – and start planning the next steps. If you want to take more proactive action, our 24/7 call centre on 138332 can take action on any compromised registered cards, phone numbers or passports. This is a different product to Identity Watch, it’s called Secure Sentinel, but it’s all part of the same family. Just register for it here if this interests you.

Data breaches can occur in a number of ways:

• lost or stolen hardware including laptops, tablets, phones and removable storage devices, as well  as paper records containing personal information
• storage devices being disposed of or returned to lease companies without the contents being erased. This can include hard disk drives and other digital storage media (integrated in other devices, for example, multifunction printers, or otherwise)
• databases containing personal information being ‘hacked’ into or otherwise illegally accessed by individuals outside of the agency or organisation
• employees accessing or disclosing personal information outside the requirements or authorisation of their employment
• paper records stolen from insecure recycling or garbage bins
• personal information mistakenly being provided to the wrong person, for example by sending details out to the wrong address, and an individual deceiving an agency or organisation into improperly releasing the personal information of another person

Depending on the size of the data breach a business can be impacted in a number of ways. Some of the impacts are:

• Loss of valuable data
• Costs of remediation and third party litigation
• Costs of breach notification
• Reputational damage to brand and diminished consumer confidence
• Revenue impacts – customers switch to competitors, prospects more likely to choose competitors
• System and technological disruptions

At least one data breach occurs every week in Australia, with an average of 20,073 records lost or stolen per incident.

Currently, the true scale of data breaches in Australia is unknown due to the lack of notification laws. Overseas experience suggests that unreported data breaches are far more common than people impacted are aware.

For more information, see our November 2015 Cybercrime and Fraud Report.