Bay of Plenty residents are being warned that the ways malicious content and scams approach users online is rapidly changing, and Safe Surfer CEO Rory Birkbeck is urging Kiwis to be vigilant.
Phishing websites, or imitation websites, are becoming more and more convincing, according to Rory.
These websites will often look identical to a real website, and urge the user to insert information such as credit card details or passwords.
To tackle this growing problem, Rory and his team have developed an application that can be run on computers, tablets and phones.
The application is called Safe Surfer – after the name of their non-profit social enterprise Safe Surfer – and it blocks most malicious content online by running websites through a filter, and preventing access to the ones that are deemed as harmful.
The local non-profit social enterprise Safe Surfer was established in 2016 by Tauranga IT experts and friends Aaron Sinclair and Rory, who wanted to prevent their own young families from accidentally seeing pornographic images while using the internet.
Safe Surfer is now a growing movement – and is being used by more than 300,000 individuals, families and businesses worldwide.
As a preventative measure, Safe Surfer has decided to block all Russian URLs as a method of stopping scams. “Russian domains are often not regulated to the same standards as ones in the West,” says Rory.
“They are known to house a lot of…
