Cosmic Cocktails boss Clint Gurney remembers all too well the panic he felt when he realised his business website had disappeared from the internet. “I put in cosmiccocktails.com.au and I went, ‘Holy crap, where are we?’,” he says. “That’s just a feeling that you do not want to have. It’s like someone just kicked you in the guts.” In a haze of disbelief, Gurney kept searching frantically. But the site wasn’t there. It had been taken down by hackers almost six months earlier. The hack devastated the business. “We had nothing in our diary for the next 12 months, which was just unheard of,” Gurney says. “We closed the business for two months. I had to put off all my staff,
and just figure out what the hell we were going to do.”

In June 2019, WA Insurance Brokers were the victims of a serious cyber incident, in the form of a ransomware attack that resulted in a major network outage for the business