Millions of more Americans are beginning to work from home amid the COVID-19 outbreak and hackers are looking to take advantage.
Security Engineer Maya Levine spoke with FOX 17 News over Facetime, she says a global pandemic like this one is the exact opportunity cyber-thieves are looking for.
“Hackers are not the best people, they will take whatever opportunity to can to their advantage to earn money. In this case we’ve seen hackers using this coronavirus in various different ways to try and increase revenue and spread malicious things they will get money from,” Levine said.
Cyber attacks, malware and phishing scams are all on the rise, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel warned about the latter last week.
Levine says people have to remain diligent about checking sources of emails, websites, even online calls, before clicking or downloading.
“The same kind of policy that you had before in the office, applies here. Don’t click on things where you don’t know the sender, you don’t know where it’s from, only use really quality sources, so if you are googling something see the source and see if it’s been verified,” Levine explained.
Businesses should have their employees use a VPN anytime they’re connecting online at home.
“Now that we have so many people working from the outside, you need a way to still securely connect to that network that has all the security tools in place and the most common way to do that is with a VPN,” she added.
Another things experts recommend is to make sure WIFI networks and all the devices connected to it are protected with a unique password you came up with.
