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Cyber Security Awareness Month 2024: 4 ways to help keep you cyber secure

Australia has an ambitious goal to become a world leader in cyber security by 20301.

A large part of that is making sure Australian organisations and those that live and work here understand the steps they can take to make themselves more secure.

This October, CommBank is joining forces with Australian organisations from across a range of industries and Government to highlight four key actions to take across the month that can help make you and your organisation more secure.  

Week 1: Activate Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

The first message for the month is to activate MFA wherever possible. MFA is an additional layer of security that acts as an additional barrier to an attacker in the event your password is compromised.

Passwords can be compromised in any number of ways.

  • We can be tricked into accidentally giving them away by a phishing email that takes you to a fake login page that harvests our username and password.
  • A database containing our password information can be stolen from a service we use.
  • With a cybercrime reported every six minutes in Australia2, it pays to take the time to switch on MFA, especially for critical services such as email. 
  • Watch a video on MFA
  • Read the article Understanding MFA


Week 2: Apply automatic updates to all software

Software updates are more than just functional improvements – they’re crucial for your device’s security. These updates often include patches for vulnerabilities that attackers can exploit. By enabling automatic updates for your device, operating systems and applications, you help protect your systems from potential threats.

Week 3: Avoid password re-use. Use passphrases

30% of small businesses have upgraded passwords to passphrases3. That’s according to the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia (COSBOA)’s Cyber Wardens program.

That means there is still work to be done. Passphrases are a good idea because passwords are often simple to guess and quick for computers to break.

The temptation is also often to re-use passwords or use passwords that are linked to something or someone special to you. Below is a video that shows how that makes it easy to break passwords.

The goal of a passphrase is to create something that’s easy for you to remember, but hard for a computer to guess. A nice approach is:

  1. Pick 4-5 random letters eg. RKEB
  2. Think of a word that starts with each letter eg. RosyKoalaEggyBread
  3. Add some numbers or characters if you like eg. RosyKoala&2EggyBread
  4. That’s your passphrase!


Week 4: Ask “Is this a phishing email?”

Phishing emails are a common vector of attack used to trick people into giving away sensitive information, including passwords and login details, or downloading fake apps or malicious software.

Whenever you receive an email that looks or feels a bit odd or unexpected, remember to Stop, Check and Reject.


We can all play a part in shutting down cyber criminals. For the latest scams targeting customers, search ‘CommBank Safe’ on the CommBank website.

1 Australian Government Department of Home Affairs, 2023-2030 Cyber Security Strategy, November 2023.
2 Australian Government, The National Office of Cyber Security, August 2024.
3 Cyber Wardens Research Report, March 2024.

Things you should know 

This article is intended to provide general information of an educational nature only. The information in this article and any opinions, conclusions or recommendations are reasonably held or made, based on the information available at the time of its publication but no representation or warranty, either expressed or implied, is made or provided as to the accuracy, reliability or completeness of any statement made in this article.