Chamber hosts breakfast discussion on cyber attacks

Tom Ervin, FBI squad computer scientist, discussed cyber attacks at the San Marcos Area Chamber of Commerce Business @ Breakfast educational series. 

Ervin, who highlighted various cyber threats from phishing to malware threats, spoke at the City of San Marcos Rec Hall on Tuesday. 

“I kind of call what I do cyber forensics,” Ervin told the crowd of about 30, “where I’m not just looking at hard drives but all forms of digital evidence. I work criminal cases, counterintelligence cases, and so it’s a wide variety of different cyber threats that we address all the way from the criminal side all the way to state-sponsored — those are countries that are hiring hackers to get information.” 

Ervin, who works at the FBI Headquarters in San Antonio, spent over an hour discussing various cyber threats. He demonstrated how phishing and spear phishing, which are defined as  “(scams) by which an Internet user is duped (as by a deceptive email message) into revealing personal or confidential information which the scammer can use illicitly,” according to Merriam-Webster. 

He also showed how hackers can get information through WiFi and mobile applications. 

“Why are these cyber threats so successful? One of the big things I attribute it to is social engineering — the clever manipulation of the natural human tendency to trust,” Ervin said. “Trust that is the big thing.”