WAYNESBORO – This is the last of a 6 part interview by Samantha Wolfe of the Law Offices of Samantha K. Wolfe LLC, with Cermak Technologies, Inc. owner Mike Cermak, Jr. The interview is lightly edited.
Sam: What hacking schemes have you seen lately?
Mike: There are a wide variety of them.
For example, one of the scariest is when people try to trick you into giving them your password. Very often, you will get an email that looks official. Maybe it will look like something from your office, or maybe it will look like it is from Microsoft or Google or whomever you have your email through. Sometimes it will be from your IT Department. They do it in many ways, but most of these scams are typically not targeted directly at you. They are just sending to millions of people and hoping a handful of people will fall for it.
When you are targeted, it gets scary. We have seen a couple of those recently where they have obviously done some research, pulled your logo off your website, and put it into this email and sent it to you specifically. They mention names of people who are in your office. The result they really want is to trick you into giving them your password to your email. Once they get into your email, they are effectively into everything.
A couple of ways they can do that is they can say your password is about to expire, click here to reset it. Or they can say your mailbox is out of space or it is going to expire soon – click here to renew it or expand it. Or there is an important document that has been sent securely to you from your bank or from your client, “click here.”
Those are difficult to detect because they look like legitimate emails. The hackers usually make it sound urgent and ask you to click a link quickly. It’s easy to blindly click on it and say yes this looks the same as the usual Microsoft or whoever you use, and you type in your username and password.
And then you think, “Oh, did I just give my password to someone?” That is why it is so important that we do two-factor identification. Even if they have the password, they still can’t get in.
Another scam involves a link you click that causes your computer to make a siren noise. It says, “Your computer is infected, call me immediately.”
They want to play on that, they want to get you excited and get your emotions going – make you act before you think. They want to try to play on that as much as they can. They have a 1-800 number there and they say they are Microsoft, which of course they are not. They play that up, saying, “Your computer has been infected, and we saw it here on our system. We can remote in and clean it up for you and it is only going to cost you a couple hundred dollars.”
You give them your credit card number, and who knows how much they will charge on it. Then if they do get remote access to your computer, who knows what they can do on that as well.
What is nice about it is there is also a very simple solution for it. If you go to a website that happens to be infected, and even I have done that, and it pops up and they siren and all of that, turn off your computer. They will even tell you on the popup ‘Do not restart your computer, Call
us immediately.” And the solution is to just restart your computer. That is typically all you have to do.
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If you have technical questions you would like to ask, email [email protected] with the title “Ask the Tech Guy”. Mike will respond to your questions in the Voices section of LocalNews1.org.
Mike Cermak is President of Cermak Technologies Inc, with offices at 46 South Potomac Street in Waynesboro and 201 Prospect Avenue in Hagerstown. For over 20 years, Cermak has managed computers and networks for businesses in Franklin County, PA and Washington County, MD. They specialize in IT services for small businesses, including computer service, system management, business phone systems, surveillance cameras, and website development. Cermak Technologies can be reached at (717) 762-8234, 1-888-4-CERMAK, or [email protected].
Samantha Wolfe is an attorney in Waynesboro PA, located at 20 East Sixth Street, Suite 206, Waynesboro PA 17268. She can be contacted at 717-655-2676, or through her website, www.skwlawoffice.com
