What might look like a harmless email from your child’s school or like a text notification from your express delivery service can actually be a sophisticated “phishing” attack. Cyber criminals use well-disguised fake emails or phone numbers that bait you into clicking through to malicious websites to provide sensitive information like passwords, account numbers, or credit card details. And just like that, they take over your accounts. Okyo Garde keeps an innocent click from becoming stolen information by preventing the connection to the malicious website from ever happening.

There’s a lot of talk nowadays about “ransomware.” These types of attacks can start in the places you least expect. Online ads can contain small pieces of code that get downloaded to your computer without your knowledge to establish a base on your device for connecting to malicious sites. Those sites can then download ransomware to your computer, which, as the name implies, can encrypt your data until you agree to pay a big sum of money to have it unlocked. Okyo Garde can protect you by preventing the malicious code in the ad from downloading on your device.

Our homes are becoming “smarter” through more and more devices connecting to the internet. Unfortunately, those connections offer an opportunity for cybercriminals. Just like your laptop, your new smart TV can become infected with viruses. Those viruses can allow an attacker to remotely take over the microphone on your smart TV and listen to everything going on in your house. Those viruses can also give cybercriminals a path to accessing other things on your home network, like your tablet to steal personal information or even home security systems to unlock your doors when you are away. Okyo Garde makes your smart TV and all of the connected devices in your home more secure by preventing them from connecting to malicious actors on the open internet, so you can watch your TV without it watching you.

If you use a work computer at home from your employer, it's likely that it has VPN (virtual private network) software on it to connect your computer to your employer's corporate network securely. But sometimes you might disable the VPN. For example, you may want to access a job site without your employer knowing it, and accidentally end up downloading a job description from an attacker posing as a recruiter. The downloaded file could infect your work computer and that infection can then move to your corporate systems. Okyo Garde prevents the connection to the attacker even if the work VPN is disabled on the computer, keeping both you and the company safe.

The pandemic has led to an increase in cyberattacks on small businesses — even very technical people have become susceptible to sneaky and sophisticated attacks. So, when you’re rushing to book travel for an important customer meeting and click on a low fare banner ad, probably the last thing on your mind is cybercrime. But that particular ad can easily download a small amount of code to your computer, establishing a connection to a malicious site on the internet. With remote control of your computer, an attacker can download a program called a keylogger to your device, which sends everything you type on your keyboard to the bad guys — from usernames to passwords to your clients' information to other sensitive business and personal data. Okyo Garde can protect your business by preventing downloaded code from contacting malicious destinations on the internet.

Someone might think they’re innocently checking their personal email in a browser while on a break from work but many systems are set by default to download email images automatically, and it's possible for malicious computer code to hide in those images. Once downloaded, this kind of code can call for reinforcements to infect the computer and lock it, along with all your business’s sensitive information, until you pay up. This is called ransomware, and it's on the rise. 

A restaurant’s business has been booming since they’ve partnered with a new food delivery app. So, when the manager sees an email that their account is about to be suspended, it’s easy to see how the manager might click on it and quickly log in to the restaurant's account to make sure business won't be interrupted. Unfortunately the email wasn’t really from their app. Instead it was from a hacker looking to steal passwords. That’s an extremely convincing type of attack, called phishing, that’s designed to trick you into unwittingly sharing login and password information. Okyo Garde would not have allowed the connection to the fake app’s site and would have prevented the attack from succeeding.

When you’re a small business, popularity and attention is great news. But that kind of success can also attract a different kind of attention. With online security cameras becoming increasingly the norm, it's possible that yours could be compromised by a virus designed to record and secretly send the video feed elsewhere, auctioning the footage off to the highest bidder. Okyo Garde would prevent your camera from being connected to a malicious attacker and from sending your video stream to the wrong place.