Go back to the classroom and fly to cyber threats that steal bank details, credentials and social media accounts

17 Sep. (Portaltic/EP) –

The theft of bank data, access credentials to digital accounts and the appropriation of social network accounts are just some of the risks to which students are exposed in their day to day and that forces them to review some basic security measures to face the return to classes without worries.

The return to classes is a great focus of action for cybercriminals, mainly due to the time students spend online on the occasion of the classes, which are sometimes followed ‘online’, and of the study, which finds a great source of resources on the Internet.

According to data from Check Point Research, the Education and Research sector recorded the highest volumes of monthly attacks in both 2022 and 2021 globally.

In July this year, this group shows more than twice weekly cyberattacks compared to the average of all other industries and had an average of almost 2,000 attacks per organization each week (an increase of 6% compared to July of last year and 114% compared to the same period two years ago), as stated in a statement sent to Europa Press.

Bank fraud, if students have a card associated with your Internet accounts, or if they have that of a family member or friend; credential theft, of identity or appropriation of accounts in social networks, are the main challenges that students have to face. Sometimes it happens that the little ones ‘mess around’ with their parents’ devices, which do have their associated data.

“The majority of security flaws here are due to to human error itself, so students have to be very attentive to emails and websites that are not the official ones,” says the technical director of Check Point Software for Spain and Portugal, Eusebio Nieva.

Avoid the danger of ‘phishing’ -the impersonation of a known and reliable source- means stopping to think before clicking on a link, as explained by the company. This threat uses false URLs through SMS, messaging applications such as WhatsApp or emails to spread and deceive the most unwary users.

Also in relation to ‘phishing’, we must avoid downloading attachments from strangersas they may contain ‘malware’, which can infect the entire computer and steal or hijack information.

Although they have public Wi-Fi available to them, Check Point recommends that students avoid them, or at least do not use them without protection. As they explain, anyone can connect to one, including cybercriminals, which makes it easy for them to access everything stored on the user’s device.

Also, it is “essential” that the website has an encrypted connection and SSL certificate, which is identified by the beginning of the url ‘https’. And use a different password for each application or digital service, to prevent the theft of a password from giving access to all the other sites.