By Robert A. Emmanuel
From a photo of Governor General Sir Rodney Williams being used on Facebook to defraud persons of thousands of dollars, to an alleged hacking of a local company’s email by a Chinese firm in order to carry out US$100,000 wire fraud, ensuring that you are aware of the dangers and to be protected online should be a priority as the country moves into week two of 2024.
Observer media spoke with two cybersecurity experts about tips and important information that people should be aware of this year.
Adam Dennis is an Antiguan American who spent the last 27 years working remotely in managing his software company based in the US and has launched AntiguaRecon to help youth on the island in cybersecurity.
He said that the first rule of protecting yourself online is what he called the “zero-trust rule.”
“If you get an e-mail or a text from somebody saying something, asking you to download a file or click a link, confirm that it’s legitimate.
“This is something that, with my older relatives, I constantly have to stress is like, look, just because you got a message from a company seems legitimate, telling you to download a document doesn’t mean it’s from that company…you need to validate that’s actually true.
“Now, does that mean that you have to do extra work? Yes. But does it mean that it helps you avoid massive heartache? If you do that validation, most definitely,” he said.
With the rise of artificial intelligence tools such as OpenAI, AI-enabled voice cloning, deepfakes—AI generative media used to portray fake events or to copy someone’s likeness — having an understanding of what is real and what is fake should be a priority for people in 2024.
“If you give me a recording of somebody’s voice, that this is a very limited period of time. I can reproduce that voice so I could conceivably- and this is where you’re going to see more sophisticated phishing, where somebody will call it might just sound like your kid.
“They might sound like your child saying ‘Mom, I need help, can you give me money?’ Now the one way to deal with that is have some private keywords that you use,” he explained.
Another important tip to remember is often the simplest thing you can do with any device: ensure that it is up to date with the latest patches.
Whether that update is for the social media app that you regularly use yet become frustrated with the constant requests to update the app or the computer or laptop asking you to restart for a few minutes to complete its installation of software updates, Dennis said this remains a critical part of stay safe online.
“The third thing I’d recommend is to create a backup schedule for your main computers, and in that backup schedule, if you can do a two-tiered backup schedule where you have you back up every day or on some type of regular basis and save one copy that’s two weeks old or even a month old,” he added.
Many young children in Antigua and Barbuda often have some form of electronic device, whether it is a phone, iPad or tablet, or even a laptop in some instance.
For parents, Dennis noted, it is critical to ensure that your child is safe while they are online.
This includes ensuring that cybersecurity software which offer decently priced family protection packages, like Kaspersky Safe Kids or Norton, are enabled.
For older children and teens, awareness around the proper use of social media is even more important.
Whether it is TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or even Twitter (now known by X), ensuring that children are not posting photos or videos of themselves which places them in compromising positions.
When asked what can be done to help protect young women or persons against social media threats, Dennis noted that there is no easy solution.
“As a young person, you’re going to have predators out there trying to engage and get you to do stupid things and then use that to leverage against you.
“I remember reading a really sad article about six months ago of a young guy in the United States, who thought he was talking to this girl that he had a crush on in high school.
“She got him to send her a picture of himself in a in a compromised way, and it turns out it wasn’t the young girl.
“It was obviously someone that was then trying to set him up and get him to send money and the kid committed suicide, so I think, you know, as a parent of a young person, you’ve got to be realistic,” he said.
Dennis explained that predators and other bad actors can use a photo taken with geolocation on to stalk and harass individuals.
“As these young people get old, you got to raise them and teach them that, under no circumstances, do you ever take nudity shots and send them to a friend or a lover or anything like that because you can never guarantee where that’s going to end up and that’s often that’s often the leverage that’s used to manipulate young people,” he remarked.
He also explained that tools like open-source intelligence can be used by bad actors to create a profile of you as an individual in order to target, harass or blackmail.
“One of the most brilliant attacks I’ve seen in the last number of years was the mass e-mail that went out that said, ‘I know you’ve been looking at porn and I’m going to let your family know about it’.”
“Now, why is that brilliant? Well, because if you understand any of the statistics about Internet behaviour, and how people think about porn, the vast majority aren’t going to admit that they looked at it, right?
“So, sending that e-mail out saying I know you looked at porn, they’re going to capture a certain percentage of people who are going to send money to not have that information revealed. “And the person who sent it doesn’t even need to know anything about whether or not you actually looked at porn because they could bank on the fact that you probably did,” Dennis explained