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Australia's cyber agency has just put a price on it. Cybercrime now costs a medium-sized business $141,300 on average. Up 45% in a year, and almost what it costs a large company. Large companies have their own security teams. Most medium-sized businesses don't, and attackers have noticed. How exposed is your business? Our 3-minute self-check shows where you stand and what to fix first. Prefer to talk it through? Our security specialists are here to help.

Banks, airlines and governments took websites offline this week over two flaws in the code that runs most websites. The part that matters for your business: someone was trying to exploit them four days before the fix came out. The flaws are known as PHP2Shell, and the fix was released at 1am on Thursday. "If your websites were updated on Thursday, you've done the urgent part," says Charles Mann, our Chief Information Security Officer. "You haven't done the whole job." Here's what's easy to miss. 1. Check it actually happened. Ask whoever runs each site for the date and time it was patched. Some hosts patch without changing the version number, so ask rather than guess. 2. Change the passwords and keys stored on your web servers. One of the two flaws can leak what's in a server's memory, and that can include passwords, tokens and API keys. 3. Ask whether anyone got in first. Amazon recommends looking back to 17 October. An attack can leave very little in normal logs, so this needs someone who knows what to look for. 4. Tell your staff. Hacked websites that people already trust can be used for fake login pages and instructions to paste commands. If a familiar site suddenly asks for either, stop and check. Australia's national cyber security agency, the ACSC, says it isn't aware of any successful attacks here yet. If you haven't dealt with it yet, there's still time to get ahead of it. The full advisory is in our Cyber Brief, with a ready-made email that asks your website provider the questions above. Copy it, paste it and send it today.

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