Viruses and malware are malicious software programs written by hackers in order to compromise the integrity of a device. These malicious programs vary in their purpose and also have different degrees of severity. At some point in time, every PC or mobile device user must have had their device infected with a virus or malware, and oftentimes, a simple anti-virus scan using an antivirus software will detect and take care of such corrupted programs.
Top Cyber Risks Take a New Turn in 2020
As of today, Internet users face a lot of risks while using the Internet and these are, of course, asides viruses and malware. Some of these are:
- Phishing: This has become more sophisticated as hackers now use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to train models to learn corporate lingo and collect voice snippets in order to perfect their attacks.
- Ransomware: Hackers are now targeting the big fishes – cloud computing storages – as they store information of so many organizations and a successful attack on this infrastructure will yield huge returns in ransom for the hacker.
- IoT attacks: In a bit to get access to mobile devices and personal computers, hackers now focus on breaching IoT devices such as smart coffee makers, smart microwaves, and so on, which oftentimes do not have very tight security implemented
Staying Safe from these Cyber Risks
Below are some ways by which a user can stay safe from these cyber risks:
1.Avoid connecting to public Wi-Fi. The risks associated with public WiFi include man-in-the-middle attacks, spoofing, sniffing, etc. – all of which could potentially lead to loss of assets.
2. Downloading a VPN application and using it when sending sensitive information over the Internet is also a good way to go. VPN adds an additional layer of security to the information being transferred; thereby making them useless to whoever intercepts them.
3. A good rule of thumb is to log-out of accounts when they are not in use. In the case of any infection, the virus will not be able to access those accounts once they aren’t logged in.
4. Another option is to have a firewall enabled on your PC or server. This would help filter the traffic that comes into your home or office network.