Dan Cîmpean, head of the National Cyber Security Directorate (DNSC), stated that more and more people are falling victim to cyber attacks. He also explained what measures can be taken to avoid these problems.
More and more Romanians fall victim to cyber attacks Photo: Archive
According to the director of the DNSC, the chances that the cheated will recover their money or data are very low.
“More and more ordinary citizens fall victim to such deceptions. It happens every day, unfortunately. The chances of recovering your money or data when you fall victim to such a criminal group are, unfortunately, very low, primarily because many of these criminal groups do not operate from Romania. Unfortunately, the cyber space is one without borders and it happens that such groups launch this type of deception campaigns, attack campaigns on users’ devices, on personal data or the data they use in their professional activity, practically from anywhere in world“, said Dan Cîmpean, director of DNSC, on Antena 3 CNN.
Dan Cîmpean believes that, under these conditions, prevention is very important.
“We have to be very honest, a small but applied number of preventive measures save us probably from 75-80% of the problems in cyberspace. Very simple measures, such as using passwords or simply being careful not to respond to any message, any e-mail, any questioning from strangers. So these simple measures save us from problems in this space“Cîmpean also said.
The DNSC chief says people need to be aware of the risks when using apps that ask for phone numbers or email addresses.
“This does not mean, obviously, to reduce or stop our activity in the digital space, but we must be aware of the main risks. Obviously, providing email addresses, personal data, phone numbers increases our digital footprint and for criminal groups or state groups, it simply helps them prepare their attacks against us. It is very important to check, as far as we can, the veracity of the sites on which we provide this data, to check who are the people we interact with, to try to get to know them and not to accept, if possible, interaction with strangers, because they have developed more and more sophisticated social engineering methods and, unfortunately, they are also helped by artificial intelligence. We see more and more message texts, e-mail texts written in an impeccable Romanian language, very up-to-date or referring to some very recent events, which are very, very credible“, he also said.
