Cyber ​​incident in Columbus

OHIO — A significant increase in cyberattacks has IT staff busy as the city of Columbus works to get IT services back up and running for its customers after facing an unspecified cybersecurity incident late last week.

Israel Arroyo, founder and owner of Stealth Entry Cyber ​​Security Solutions, said we are seeing an increase “due to the fact that more people in the world are reachable” and therefore also due to increased accessibility.

“You’re opening up this threat landscape. You’re opening it up exponentially because you trust everybody now,” he said. “If you have something you think you can trust that looks legitimate, it’s going to fool people.”

This has nothing to do with the fact that they have only limited programming knowledge, but is simply sufficient to bypass entire systems and cause them to crash.

Given the increasing number of incidents, healthcare is one of the sectors where most attacks occur.

“Protected health information is actually more valuable than the credit card data currently available on the Internet,” he said. “People’s health information can be used to manipulate health insurance premiums.”

He noted that as technology evolves, it is difficult to maintain protection, especially with the rise of artificial intelligence. Still, he said it can still be helpful to protect yourself by using two-factor authentication, changing passwords and installing antivirus software on devices.