Shark Tank's Robert Herjavec: the scariest threat to safety is not just coronavirus

The coronavirus has not only left the world paralyzed with fear of getting sick, but also presents new opportunities for hackers to attack the private sector, this according to Robert Herjavec, founder and CEO of Herjavec Group and star of Shark Tank.

“Robert Mueller had a great saying, which was ‘there’s only two types of companies, those that have been hacked and those that are about to be hacked,’” Herjavec told Kitco News. “What I tell people is, ‘I can’t stop you from being hacked, but I can create an ecosystem [such] that when you have an intrusion, you can quickly know it’s going on.’”

Herjavec, who helms a cyber security solutions company, said that a large number of cyberattacks come in the form of email phishing.

“My general rule for people that work at companies is anything that isn’t business oriented, that you don’t know the source of, you probably shouldn’t be opening it up at work,” he said, adding that a personal email account that gets phished can be an inconvenience, but exposing an entire company to such a risk can be “really bad.”

The security compromises from the U.S. presidential elections in 2016 have put cyberattacks at the nationwide level on the public’s radar, thereby lowering the chances of electronic voting taking place in the near future, Herjavec said.

“My big hope was that we’re going to have electronic voting, because if I can vote from my phone, from an app, guess what? You’re going to have voting rates way above 30%. With what happened last election, what it’s made people realize is it’s fundamentally not safe,” he said.

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