Criminals are finding sneakier ways to access your data and steal your cash.
Sophisticated scams are on the rise, and new research from Virgin Media O2 shows one in five 5 Britons have already been hacked.
An investigation by the telecoms giant and Good Morning Britain shows how easily your data can be accessed…
How an email address can give criminals your details
While personal scams are on the rise, so too are cyberattacks on well-known high street names. M&S has been a recent casualty after criminals froze critical systems.
Freelance ethical hacker Brandyn Murtagh works with businesses, including Virgin O2, to identify and fix these vulnerabilities to prevent further attacks.
Murtaugh does not have a criminal background, he uses the same techniques used by criminals for good to see what information hackers might have access to through just an email address.
He told Dave Fishwick, who has been working on preventing scams, that he has an ethical hacking system that can search up to 28 billion ‘hacked’ records from 2010 to 2025 within three minutes.
Dave Fishwick has worked with ITV and ethical hacker Brandyn Murtaugh
There are also marketplaces online where criminals can pay for hacked information.
With just the emails of two volunteers, Murtagh was able to find current and previous passwords, including a work one, email addresses and phone numbers. He even found their addresses and the places they’ve recently visited.
All of this information can be used by a hacker to access banking passwords that can then be reset to give criminals full control of their accounts.
Murtagh says one of the worst instances was a hacker having access to an email address, from which they were able to lock out access to every account associated with the user, including financial and social media profiles.
How to protect yourself
Dave Fishwick has worked with ITV to help people protect themselves from hackers.
His number one tip is to choose a strong and unique password for each login and use two-factor authentication.
Virgin O2’s research shows that a quarter of people use basic passwords, with nearly half reusing the same one across different sites. Most worryingly, one in 20 admits to using ‘password’ as their password.
People should be cautious of cold calls out of the blue from big organisations, like HMRC, particularly as hackers keep up with current affairs to trick people into handing over their information.
The most recent example of this has been a winter fuel payment scam text sent to pensioners, but Murtaugh says the most common scams are in connection with recruitment.
This Is Money revealed this scam two years ago, when a reader was scammed out of £16,500, leaving her penniless.
Dave also says people need to report scam texts via 7726, which is used by every mobile phone provider.
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