Dr. Ali Dehghantanha, professor in the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, spoke to Yahoo! News Canada about cyber security in the wake of online scammers targeting wildfire evacuees in the Northwest Territories.

“Cyber criminals are quite opportunistic,” he said, warning folks to think twice about the messages they receive and where they originate from. Scammers could send links to websites or forms hoping to fool people into clicking on them and installing software that gives them remote access.

Dehghantanha is a professor in the School of Computer Science, Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence and director of the Cyber Science Lab. His research focuses on digital forensics and artificial intelligence.