Today, Boris and I will talk about how to keep you safe from cyber criminals over this holiday season.
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We're going to take about five to 10 minutes of your time, depending on how we get into specifics here to give you the most like, up to date advice and keep you, your families and your businesses safe.
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I'm Alex with Ark It.
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With me today, the CEO and founder of ARC it, Boris.
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What's up, Boris, baby?
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Criminals are not sleepy, man.
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It's a holiday season.
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Criminals are not sleeping.
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So the reason why we wanted to put this together is because criminals are getting a lot more active during the holiday season.
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They want to play on our happiness and lack of paying attention to certain things.
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And also us being busy with either shopping for our friends and family for gifts or just at work trying to sneak out early to do some, you know, some home cooking for the holidays.
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And basically, we're a lot more busier during the season.
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Criminals prey on that.
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They want to send you stuff that will get you to react without thinking.
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And because you're busy, most likely you're less.
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You're not thinking as much.
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So I guess that's the first thing is just know that during this holiday season, you will get a lot more stuff from the bad guys that can lead you down a bad path.
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So pay attention, Pay attention is the most important thing.
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Anytime you think you need to click on something, stop, take a deep breath, give yourself three seconds and think.
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If you really need to click on that something that shows up in your.
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Email, let's start going down from the highest most likely rank or highest most likely attempt by these cyber criminals to least likely, like the emails and the phone calls.
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What would you say is the most likely thing to get people caught in the web of cybercriminals right now?
Speaker A:
That's a very good question.
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So specifically, we see an increase in emails about shipping notifications.
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So the bad guys know that a lot of people shop online and they will flood your mailbox with stuff like, hey, your FedEx package is getting delivered tomorrow, or your FedEx package has been delivered and you're like, well, I don't see the package.
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Well, click on a link to find out where it is.
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And you know, those links usually go to websites that then require you to log in, whether they're your Microsoft or your Google or your Facebook accounts.
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But those are fake websites.
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And once you log in, the bad guys have your credentials, so that's something to pay attention to.
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The other one is in a similar way and is like, you just ordered this product for 400 from this web store, stuff that you've never ordered, you know, would show up in your inbox.
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And again, the bad guys will try to force you to either click a link and you know, give up your credentials to something that's very important or to call the 800 number and then they can get you on a phone.
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And there the scam gets a little more elaborate.
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Right, because they try to get you to install some software either on your computer or your phone.
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And they can, if you are really not stopping them, they can get into a lot of your accounts, even bank accounts.
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So most, most hacks have occurred through what we call social engineering versus technical know how.
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So in other words, the criminals will follow your life to the extent they can and be able to set up and pretend to be someone else.
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So if the email is coming from your partner asking you for a payment that they need a little bit sooner this time to pay the payroll, usually they'll come up with a really good reason they got to pay their workers or something like that.
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It's holiday season bonuses, can you please make this payment?
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They might even know what that amount is, what the company is, and they'll misspell the company name or the company was being would be misspelled in a link that will take you to the payment.
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So be hyper vigilant when it comes to anyone asking you for to do anything, right, Anything.
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So stop and think.
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As Boris said, take a breath, stop and think.
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If it's something that you are, you know, day to day stuff, you pay in invoices, you go to QuickBooks, that's fine.
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But if somebody sends you a text message to speed up invoice payment of some kind, almost for sure, something fishy going on.
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Absolutely.
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Stick to the routines, pay attention.
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Yep.
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So on the text message front, the, the other common one that's been going on for a long, long time, but people still fall for it unfortunately is, is if you're, you get a text message that basically says, usually it's from either your manager or your coworker or your boss that says, hey, are you free?
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Are you available?
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And you're like, yes, I'm available, what's up?
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And they're like, well look, you need to quickly go and get five gift cards.
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We're trying to do this present for our big client and go get five gift cards, crash out the numbers and send to me stuff like that.
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It's old as life, this scam, but people still fall for it, especially around holiday times because it is the gifting season and gift card seems to make sense at that time.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So if anything looks at all unusual, take a breath, take a moment.
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I think that's the most important thing.
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Stick with your routines when you're paying bills, pay through QuickBooks or your accounting system whenever it has to do with gifts and stuff like that.
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Don't click on anything unusual, don't click on any shipment notifications.
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And the first thing you want to do if you are curious about anything related to your transactions is go directly to your bank log in, Go directly to your credit card log in.
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Take your time.
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Don't send money to anybody.
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And if you need help with your it, and if you are architecture design engineer for engineering firm, you're in luck.
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ARC IT is looking forward to helping you with your technology.
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So getarchit.com is where you find us.
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We want you to stay safe over these holidays.
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Boris, any last parting words of wisdom to our viewers?
Speaker A:
I think we covered it all, so happy holidays to everybody.
Speaker B:
Happy holidays.
Speaker B:
Stay vigilant, stay safe, have a fantastic time with your family and give us a call if you need help with your it.
