Interview
3 min read
For our latest expert interview on our blog, we’ve welcomed Tamas Kadar to share his thoughts on the topic of cybersecurity and his journey as the CEO of SEON.
Tell us about the business you represent, what is their vision & goals?
SEON Technologies is a fraud prevention software company for ambitious FinTech leaders like Revolut, NuBank, Afterpay, Wise, and Mollie. We envision a world where online businesses can operate free of mind, without the encumbrance of watching out for their backs because of fraudsters.
While this remains a challenging task, we are trying our best to help as many businesses as possible to detect and prevent fraudulent users.
What inspires and energises you within your work?
The ability to make a difference and build up a fraud-free world is rewarding by itself. However, going the extra mile and actually making a tangible impact in an industry that helps people is what really brings true fulfilment.
It’s the little things in our work and career that helps thousands of people that inspires me to continue doing what we do best. Fighting fraud!
Can you share a little bit about yourself and how you got into cybersecurity?
At first, we thought of entering the crypto market and started our first fiat exchange platform for Central and Eastern Europe with my friend from university, Bence Jendruszák. However, we were shocked to witness our digital assets’ safety got compromised by fraudsters and we quickly found out that there were no adequate security firms to help out with this issue.
The solution we came up with was to effectively secure certain digital assets from fraudsters and expand them into a viable business. This is what led us to create SEON Technologies and channel its growth to this day.
What advice would you give to someone wishing to start their career in cybersecurity?
The first piece of advice would be to assess your current status. Cybersecurity is a broad and complex field. Once you have a solid understanding of the types of cyber-attacks you may face and the landscape of potential vulnerabilities, it’s time to assess how you can help prevent cyberattacks and create or join a viable business that focuses on one aspect of cybersecurity.
It’s trivially easy for nefarious parties to gain access to someone’s system. Therefore building up a security infrastructure is the key to blocking all accessibility to your network. In our case, we’ve realized that a large majority of fraudsters use the same methods to defraud their prospects over and over again. So we tried to act on it by filtering out common fraudster behaviour.
What are common weaknesses in IT security strategies that companies often overlook?
Training your employees as best as you can. There is a popular belief that hacker groups with hoodies in the dark start bombarding someone’s firewall. The truth of the matter is that 90% of data breaches are caused by human error simply by giving out private data.
For example, an unaware employee voluntarily can share his password after getting duped by a phishing email, providing an opportunist with an easy way to gain access to the business’s data.
Would you like to share any cybersecurity forecasts or predictions of your own with our readers?
In the past 2 years, our experience tells us that more and more people are moving their business online as well as accommodating remote workers as lockdowns and curfew had taken over. As the digital space of the world grows, so do criminals make good use of loopholes to commit fraud against both individuals and businesses.
So far in one of our cybercrime reports, we’ve uncovered the most common types of internet crimes that prey on online businesses in the US. Email phishing and pharming are the most common types of cyberattacks happening and will continue to be a popular threat to many online retailers and unaware businesses. However, as the years progress, more and new types of fraud and online attacks will occur like synthetic identities or SIM swapping attacks.
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