LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (KATV) — Fancy next-generation firewalls and flashy security tools might grab the spotlight, but the best way to stay safer online can be a lot less exciting — and a lot more effective.
As Cybersecurity Awareness Month gets underway, Chris Wright of Sullivan Wright Technologies said the smartest approach is “hygiene over hype,” focusing on the routine habits that reduce cyber risk over time.
“Hygiene is boring,” Wright said. “Hygiene is the mundane things you do over and over, regularly, day to day, week to week, month to month, and those are the things that get you the most bang for the buck when you’re talking about cyber risk management.”
Wright said good cybersecurity hygiene often looks like following through on the prompts people tend to ignore — like rebooting devices so updates can install, applying patches and keeping antivirus software current.
“These are the things as we’re talking about before that nag you regularly and say, please reboot your computer so that we can apply those patches. Please update your antivirus, things like that,” Wright said.
He said it’s easy to treat those reminders as an annoyance when people are trying to get back to everyday tasks — whether that’s streaming something on Netflix or finishing a work document — but the payoff can be significant.
“The benefit that those provide is substantial compared to a lot of the kind of minimal benefits of the overly hyped tools out there,” Wright said.
With more companies using consumer data for online interests — and with ads and pop-ups pushing the latest “trendy” security products — Wright said regular users can sometimes avoid getting swept up in the hype by simply waiting.
“One of the things that I’ll tell people as regular users, if you just wait it out, a lot of times the hype budget, the marketing budget for some of these companies, it’ll get expended, and then the company will kind of go back to being nothing,” he said.
For business owners trying to decide what’s legitimate and what’s not, Wright recommended bringing in expert help to evaluate risks and prioritize spending.
“If you’re a business owner, the best way to do that is, and I hate to sound like I’m selling something, bring in somebody like me. Doesn’t have to be me, but somebody like me to help you determine what your risks are and how to best combat those risks with the best return on investment,” Wright said.
He said that return on investment matters because people can get burned out when they invest time and money into tools that don’t deliver results.
“We get burned out when we spend a lot of money and spend a lot of time doing things that don’t get us any fruitful results,” Wright said.
Wright also warned that as artificial intelligence continues to grow, it’s making scams harder to spot — especially through more convincing phishing emails and social engineering attempts.
“A lot of what AI is being used for these days is to make phishing emails and social engineering things look a lot more realistic,” he said.
That means slowing down before responding to messages or requests, especially when something feels off.
“So you really need to slow down there,” Wright said. “Think about you know who that is on the phone. Does that sound like somebody you know? What are they asking for? Is that realistic? Is it… you know, are there contextual clues in there that kind of make the hairs on the back of your neck, stand up. So slow down, think about it before you act on it.”
He said that same mindset applies to everyday online decisions, including shopping and responding to emails.
“You should do that in everything,” Wright said. “Put some deliberate thought behind it before you click on buy, before you click on accept, before you take any actions from an email or anything.”
Wright said slowing down is one of the best defenses because scammers and aggressive marketers often rely on people reacting quickly.
“The more that you that you slow down, the more you wait on these things, the better you’re going to be in the long run because the attackers are looking for you to act rashly, act irrationally, act fast,” he said. “And the same thing for the hype folks. They’re really out there fearmongering, trying to get you to click on buy and stuff like that.”
Wright said the company is also building up cybersecurity content on social media this month, specifically on LinkedIn and Facebook.
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