The last thing tech security engineer Jason Jarret wants to see is businesses being held online for ransom because they fell victim to a malware attack.
He is on the frontline of digital security with IT Gold Solutions in Loganholme where he helps people and businesses daily to escape from and prepare for cyber-attacks.
“The worst ones are encryption attacks,” he said.
“They’ll get someone to click an email that has a malware, which then sends a code to copy the information on the computer and they’ll encrypt everything on the computer.”
He has seen this happen to unsuspecting businesses on Friday afternoons just as staff are about to knock off for the weekend.
Someone will click the email and expose the whole business to a ransom attack, putting them in a scary position when business resumes the following Monday.
“They come back on Monday, and everything’s encrypted, they can’t open any of their computers or any of their information unless they pay the ransom.
He said the three most common security threats are those which target vulnerable people through methods such as phishing, like the pervasive “flu-bot” text messages, by preying on weak passwords, and by targeting weaknesses in routers and firewalls of people and businesses.
People and businesses can easily gain a false sense of security that they have the correct protection in place.
“There’s one kind of router you get which is just like a regular business router, firewall and it has gateways that are opened or closed, but there’s nothing actually checking what traffic’s going in an out,” he said
“And then you’ve got a higher quality router that looks for malware and looks for code that could be malicious as it’s passing through the port, so that’s an area that a lot of people need to be aware of.”
