PITTSFIELD, Mass. - CompuWorks, an I.T. services company in Pittsfield, primarily works with small to medium-sized companies, but according to their president Dave Hall, the advice they give to companies can be applied to your home.

What You Need To Know

  • CompuWorks is a Berkshires-based I.T. services company

  • CompuWorks began in 1987 in Pittsfield, MA and has since expanded their service across the state and into several surrounding states

  • They say hackers often try to take advantage of long holiday weekends when users are less likely to notice an attack on their network

As emails pile up during the holiday season with deals and receipts, Hall said it’s easy to accidentally click on a link leading to a scam. He also said hackers are working year round to gather information.

“There’s 99 ways to hack into a network,” Hall said.

Hall said over more than three decades in business, his I.T. company has seen hackers get very creative.

“We saw one that was going around, actually it pretended to be from Spectrum of all places, and it happened to not be from Spectrum," Hall said. "But we just went over to the actual Spectrum website and went to the link and discovered it was a fake link.”

The two most common ways CompuWorks sees hackers get into networks are through email scams and exploiting users on compromised websites. Hall said cyber criminals are now using a trick where they appear to be someone their victims are familiar with.

“They’re doing what they call 'spear phishing' now where they will look up the name of an executive at a company and pretend to be that executive," Hall said. "Which, people are more inclined to click on links once they see that coming in, once they see some identifiable information.”

Hall warns people to constantly watch out for hackers, especially around long holiday weekends.

“They like to have a long weekend to work and encrypting your computers," Hall said. "Generally the attacks [become known] on Monday morning is when the attacker announces themselves.”

Whether a message appears to be from your internet and cable provider or even someone you work with, Hall said when it comes to emails his biggest piece of advice is don’t open links or attachments. He suggests typing links into browsers yourself.

Attachments which are normally considered safe files include - GIF, JPG or JPEG, TIF or TIFF, MPG or MPEG, MP3 and WAV.