Your online security update – Changes to My Account
At Synergy, online security is important to us – and we have a team dedicated to protecting the information you share with us, including your personal and payment details.
To help provide extra protection to our customers’ data and personal information, we are consistently reviewing and improving our services and security. Learn more about website improvements we’ve made to enhance your online experience and safety– and what these changes mean for you.
Changes to My Account online security
My Account has always been a secure online portal for you to manage your energy account – and our recent updates help to protect your information even further.
We have added multi-factor authentication (or MFA) to My Account. This means:
- When you log in, you’ll receive a one-time code via email or SMS to confirm that it’s you accessing your Synergy account, not someone who shouldn’t be logging in.
- Even if an unauthorised party somehow gained access to your log-in details, they would still need to complete this extra identity verification step before they could access your account.
- Multi factor authentication, sometimes called two factor authentication, can make a big difference to help prevent against unauthorised access to your data and personal information.
If you’re one of our business customers, this online security update to My Account also improves the way that you can manage your My Account for your business. You can allow multiple users to access your Synergy business account by logging in through MFA with their own phone number or emails, provided they are listed on the account as an authorised contact, which can reduce the chance for someone unauthorised to get access to your business data.
To add additional authorised users to your business account, simply give our contact centre a call on 13 13 54.
Why we have made these online security changes
The point of cyber security is to protect data (including your personal details), devices and systems. Online security measures can include tools such as anti-virus software, firewalls, password managers, multi factor authentication (MFA) and more. These tools could help to protect against the threat of viruses and other malware and help you to avoid phishing scams in your email and SMS messages which could lead to identity theft or financial fraud.
As your utility company, we need specific information about our customers to run our everyday operations. This can include:
- Information which uniquely identifies you, such as your date of birth or the date you became a Synergy customer;
- Your usage information relating to electricity supply or any other product or service we supply to you, including your address; and/or
- Financial details, including your credit card number or bank account number.
We take great care to handle your personal details using up-to-date security technology and all data about our customers is transmitted using secure encryption.
We (or a third party on our behalf) collects credit or debit card details when required to process payments – but we don’t store your full credit or debit card details (unless you choose to store your card details in your MyAccount). When we process a payment you’ve made online, your full credit card details are only transmitted between the browser and the payment merchant, which is Commonwealth BPoint.
Because of the way we use and store your personal information, we regularly monitor, and, where necessary, improve our online security measures to make sure we match the best-practice industry standards.
We monitor the resources and guidance from both the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) and the WA Office of Digital Government (DGov) to understand and monitor the changing digital and cyber threat landscape.
Cyber safety tips to help protect yourself
On a personal level, you might not be able to do much to stop cyber-crime attacks (also known as a third-party breach) on the organisations, including companies and small businesses, you deal with but you can take steps to help protect yourself from online harm. Here are some tips:
- Be wary of any unexpected communication by email, text or phone call, even if it appears to be from Synergy or another company you trust. Cyber criminals can use logos and contact details to make a fake message look real. Don’t click any links or provide any details. Instead, call the actual company to check on the message you’ve received or get in touch through their official website, not through contact details or links they might provide in the suspicious message.
- Keep your devices and apps updated with the latest software recommendations. This means whenever a company rolls out security updates to close any flaws or vulnerabilities, you’ll be better protected.
- Keep your devices, files and photos backed up to the cloud or with an external hard drive. You wouldn’t want to lose the only copies of important files or photos if you did become the victim of a cyber-crime.
- Don’t use the same passwords across different online accounts. If a hacker was to get access to your password through a third-party breach, having the same password for other online log ins means they could also access more than one of your accounts.
- Make your password hard to guess. You could use a password manager to generate and store your passwords or choose a different phrase for each online account which is unique to you and hard to guess.
- Use a secure Wi-Fi connection when you’re sharing personal details. It’s easier for hackers to intercept personal information on public Wi-Fi networks.
For more details and cyber safety tips, visit one of these government websites:
www.scamwatch.gov.au
www.cyber.gov.au
www.oaic.gov.au
The changes to My Account are just some of the online security measures we have in place to protect your personal information. For more details, explore our Online Security FAQs.
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