Advertisement

How hackers are using Black Friday to target consumers

Check Point Technologies CEO Gil Shwed joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the threat from hackers this holiday season, Gen V hacks, and Check Point's stock moves.

Video transcript

- Welcome back with Black Friday underway and Cyber Monday approaching. Consumers are busy searching the internet for the best deals on gifts. But they may also find something less desirable, hackers.

According to cybersecurity platform checkpoint DHL, Microsoft and LinkedIn were companies most imitated brands by hackers last quarter. Joining us now for more on this topic is Gil Shwed, Check Point Technologies CEO. Gil, give us a lowdown on this. Sounds a little bit alarming.

GIL SHWED: Absolutely. I think hackers are using the opportunity of Black Friday to create a lot more phishing attacks. We've seen hundreds of fake websites that were created just in the last couple of weeks that imitate the real brands. And we are all trying to get to our systems.

- Gil, what measure should retailers be looking to implement this late in the season, if anything?

GIL SHWED: I think it varies by big businesses versus consumers. I think we all need to be careful. Don't open attachments. If you see different sales campaigns that are too good to be true, they're probably too good to be true, and they are trying, and they're fake. Look at the technicalities, at the email addresses to see that you get an email from DHL, it actually says DHL. Or, if it's from Microsoft, it's from Microsoft.

For businesses, I think there is far better techniques and systems that we should implement to avoid that. And for businesses, it's very important to remember that if one employee makes some mistakes, they put the entire business at risk. So it's really, really important to keep us safe.

- And I'm reading through your notes here. You're warning about Gen V attacks, V as in Victor. I'm not familiar with these. Could you tell us about these and why they matter?

GIL SHWED: It's Gen Five attack.

- Oh, excuse me. [LAUGHS]

GIL SHWED: V is for five.

- Excuse my ignorance.

- We are not-- No, no. It's our fault, and we are now in the fifth generation of cyber attacks. And these attacks are far more sophisticated than the previous generation. Many of them are what we call polymorphic, so each time an email is sent or a file or a malicious file is being delivered, the file looks differently. So relying on what we've seen yesterday is not enough.

What they have what we call a payload, the malicious payload. The malicious payload may not be part of the initial attack. It can occur only in the third or fourth stage of the attack. So you might play a game on your mobile phone. The game will be infected, but something that doesn't look very suspicious. But then from this phone it will get to the computer, to the data m and in the third or fourth stage it will actually download something that will attack your machine at home or the entire hospital, which unfortunately we've seen.

- Gil, your stock is somewhat of an outlier in tech, up 18% in the past year. The NASDAQ's down 29%. What are you seeing in your business?

GIL SHWED: I think we have a healthy business. The demand for cyber is good. I think that the change in our companies that we are being run like a real company, we have healthy revenues, very healthy profits. And I think what we've seen in the last few years in tech is a lot of companies with business models that are not proven or with big losses. And I think, at times, when the market rationalizes a little bit, the company like us stands out.

- Well, let me ask you for your predictions about 2023 just around the corner. Anything regarding the industry you want to share with us?

GIL SHWED: I think we will see more consolidation. I think one of the challenges that businesses faced with cyber is that was way too many vendors and even businesses that want to invest in cyber. They can't implement 20 or 50 solutions. And again, when I'm talking about midsize businesses, it's around 20. When I'm talking about large companies, the Fortune 500 companies, we're talking anything from 50 to 500 different security solutions.

So we will see consolidation. The consolidation will also drive better security, because once the different security solution, your network security or endpoint even mobile, which many people don't use, will talk to each other. We will get better security.

And I think, unfortunately, we are continuing to see a big surge in attack. Just this year, the numbers of attack is 30% up. Just so we understand it, every company, every business, every organization, whether it would be a local school is being attacked around 1,000 times a week. With schools it actually can go up to 2,000, hospitals, too. Other businesses, the average in the US is around 900, and it's going up 30% in the last few years every year.

- All right, we'll leave it there. Check Point CEO, Gil Shwed, good to see you. Have a great rest of the week.

GIL SHWED: Well, wonderful. Thank you very much.