Holiday shoppers beware: Ransomware can be just 1 click away

bybukharian
Nov 26, 2022 - 18:00

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Security company Tanium said attacks like these increase during the holiday shopping season, as hackers try to capitalize on the surge of people surfing the web for deals.

(KXAN) — One wrong click is all it can take for a hacker to lock your files or account and demand money.

"We got an email from someone. And we accidentally clicked on it — it looks legitimate. We clicked on it. And then it was a hacker, and they asked us to give them ransom, or they threatened to delete our account," Amanda Wadsworth, co-founder of Tiny Pies, a small business in Austin told KXAN News.

It happened to Austin business Tiny Pies' Instagram last year.

Ransomware attackers can also threaten to reveal customers' information on the dark web, and there's a lot of that data right now.

"Organizations are managing about 10 times more data than they were even five years ago," said Bobbie Stempfley, vice president and business unit security officer for Dell Technologies.