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 malicious content, so we thought we would be proactive rather than reactive,” says Rory.

'According to Cert NZ, over the last quarter $6.6 million has been lost due to online scams.”

Rory says about $2.2 million of these losses have been from phishing scams. 'The idea is that the scammers duplicate the look and feel of certain websites. Places like The Red Cross have issued statements warning that scammers have duplicated their websites in order to scam people.”

This is why Rory is urging people now more than ever to keep an eye out when entering precious details online, as average users suffer from these attacks – as do the businesses that are being imitated.

Rory says Safe Surfer's argument is that there are commonly-abused domains that are prone to attack, and it is difficult for people to know if their next click is going to be malicious.

This is why Safe Surfer has taken the initiative of filtering out these harmful domains, so users can feel safe while surfing the web.

Rory says the best course of action to take is to keep people educated on the evolving nature of online threats, put in place a filtering tool such as Safe Surfer, making sure the website you are using is safe and secure before putting in important information, and not using passwords that have been compromised.

Rory also suggests putting in place multi-factor authentication to prevent people from getting into accounts that have been compromised.

He recommends if a user is in doubt to check with someone else to make sure the site they are using is legitimate.

'Scams also usually create some sort of urgency and will approach the user with something that seems too good to be true.”

For more information on Safe Surfer, and how to be protected while surfing the web, visit: https://safesurfer.io