A young man who works in the cybersecurity industry that’s considered excellent at what he does is now helping many companies and government agencies eliminate the threat of ransomware. His name is Alessandro Euro, and he’s only 16 years of age, yet many institutions – from Twitter, Robinhood, Capital One and others – are looking for his expertise to help get rid of this problem once and for all.
Getting Ransomware Out of the Way
Ransomware has become a hugely popular method of gaining access to other people’s funds over the past several years, and cyberthieves are utilizing it more and more to try and get their fingers on money they haven’t earned, much less deserve. The process involves locking up a computer or a network of computers and encrypting all the data on the said devices.
From there, the original owners cannot access the information and are stuck having to negotiate with the cyberthieves over how to get the data back. Most of the time, they are forced to pay a bitcoin or cryptocurrency ransom in exchange for access. It’s not fair, yet it seems to be happening more often.
As a malware analyst and crypto enthusiast, Alessandro has been a huge promoter of online privacy and customer security. He says, however, that there are still many big companies out there that boast many security flaws that allow easy access by those who know how to manipulate technical openings, though most of the time, these companies may not even know it. In a recent interview, he comments:
Every minute a loophole is discovered, which means every minute that passes by is a chance an intruder will use it to his advantage, the more times you look away its better chances of success in not being discovered.
Some of the biggest hacks have occurred this year, perhaps the most notorious one being the bitcoin Twitter hack that ran headlines last July. The social media platform was overtaken by a bad actor who gained access to some rather high-profile accounts, including those of former president Barack Obama, his vice president Joe Biden, Microsoft mogul Bill Gates and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk.
Getting Money to Save Money
From there, the hacker established several phony messages asking followers to donate BTC to anonymous addresses under the promise that their money would be doubled. This didn’t happen, and the hacker made off with $121,000 in BTC before being apprehended. Twitter has since stated it is looking to revamp its security protocols to ensure situations like these don’t happen again in the future.
Alessandro continues to promote the use of blockchain in major companies, which he says can reduce financial fraud such as double spending. Thus far, he has been paid big bucks from the likes of enterprises like AT&T and Spotify for finding mega loopholes in their security systems.
