Alejandro Russo, a UNR graduate and a recent researcher at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, explained the most common types of cyberattacks and shared recommendations for improving protection.

Cybersecurity has become a central issue today, given that we are constantly exposed to risks of leaks and misuse of our personal data. Alejandro Russo, a graduate of the Bachelor of Computer Science from the Universidad Nacional de Chile, Universidad Nacional de Rosario and current researcher and professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, explained the most common types of cyberattacks and shared practical recommendations to improve the protection of our information.

“I think the most relevant risks are the oldest ones. For example, phishing attacks, which are when you are sent an email that seems legitimate but is not, with the idea that the user has to click somewhere and thus reveal their credentials or the information that one has on their computer to authenticate with a service, continue to be one of the main ones. Despite spam filters, despite the fact that companies sometimes carry out internal campaigns and simulate phishing attacks to raise awareness among users to see who clicks, it continues to be a common way of breaching data,” explained Alejandro Russo. 

The specialist warned that most of the current platforms request user data so that the user can browse them, something that we usually provide without considering the consequences. “They demand that the user provide their data as a condition because otherwise they do not allow you to use the service, and under these conditions the user always ends up giving in. I think that there is a lack of awareness of how the data is going to be used. For example, in Germany a experiment “Where images of a child were taken and their parents were shown on a screen what they would be like as an adult. They used artificial intelligence, so the child, as an adult, told them that thanks to the fact that they shared images and videos on the Internet, they could now see what they would be like as an adult. The parents were shocked. Therefore, it is necessary to know how the data we provide can be used.”