Aviva Zacks
Avi Vaserman, Owner of Sytex, sat for an interview with Safety Detective’s Aviva Zacks and told her how much a threat humans are.
Safety Detective: What has your cybersecurity journey been and what motivated you to start Sytex?
Avi Vaserman: The expertise, sophistication, and client’s satisfaction pushed me to open my own company. Furthermore, at that time I had helped a company with the IT solution, and I needed to issue an invoice for the services. I went to my client’s office neighbor who provides legal services to get some advice on their invoice program and what use. When I told them that I was the IT person providing the software and service for their neighbor, they ask me to help them too. They told me about their accounting program, and I helped them with their solution. In the past, they had been using a traditional IT company here in Winnipeg, but they were not satisfied with the service. After I helped them out, they were very pleased with my resolution and very satisfied with my work.
We work with different companies: CPA and lawyers, financial industry, manufacturers, plumbing, heating, and other businesses. We get the first impression to see what is going on in their entire world and see how they are running, what they are doing, and how the business is going. In most cases, we find a gross lack of security.
SD: What are Sytex’s cybersecurity services?
AV: We provide protection from malware, ransomware, and hackers. We use specific technology and policy to protect our clients from these cyberthreats. We believe people should be following the policy of not using personal computers. They should use only a business computer and business websites. They should not use any website that isn’t related to the business.
SD: How does your company stay ahead of the competition?
AV: My goal is to keep our clients safe and to be ahead of everything by following the updates, reading the news, and participating in various webcasts, seminars, and gathering information. We try to exploit by using a rule-specific program and running soft scripts. Sometimes it can trigger the antivirus as protection or make a customer feel an attack and see how everyone reacts.
SD: What do you think are the worst cyberthreats today?
AV: The number one cyberthreat is people, and it doesn’t matter how much education, or how smart a person is—humans are threat number one. We have found that the number one threat in every single company is the front desk—the office administrators. The second threat in every single company is the accounting and finance industries because they are dealing with third-party providers. The third major threat would be the owners of the companies. These people can be very sophisticated but, in our experience, we have found that some of these people subscribe to third-party websites and are sometimes not able to recognize if they are looking at a phishing threat, a scam, or a malicious website, or if it is a legitimate service.
SD: How do you think cybersecurity is going to change now that we are living through this pandemic?
AV: Cybersecurity should be changed a lot. When people work from home, the major problem we have found is that they are not able to separate home and business. When a person works from home on their laptop, they tend to leave their laptop open most of the time. I believe this is the number one cybersecurity threat because when you leave your machine open, everything is open for them. A kid can go to the computer and try to get to a website, thus implementing unwanted software which can lead to a bigger problem.
Cybersecurity should be changed, but along with that change, people should also be open-minded and change their perspective about cybersecurity and how it can protect them and their sensitive information.
