With October being designated as Cybersecurity Awareness Month, Dr. Chris Mansour, cybersecurity expert, explains some ways to keep you safe.

Mansour explains one common way people get scammed is through a fraudulent practice called phishing.

"Anything that is urgent with a lot of grammar mistakes or with demanding financial information, no email should request any financial information via email," Mansour said.

Unfortunately for consumers, he says a new cyber attack, involving QR codes called quishing is now on the rise.

"If you scan it your mobile device has less protection compared to your PC or Mac and when you scan the QR code it goes immediately to the website and executes something, it could download malicious software behind the scenes that can basically lock your phone, steal information or other certain things from your device," he said.

Rachel Mott, a junior at Mercyhurst University who now minors in cyber security, said, "business data and our entire social lives are online so it is important more now than ever to protect ourselves and businesses from cyber attacks, which makes studying cybersecurity really important to protect everybody."

Mansour explained the top three cybersecurity best practices to protect yourself.

"The first one is passwords, have them long, unique and complex and of course with multi-factor authentication to add that extra level of security, the second thing is keep your software updated with the latest patches and security updates which prevents malicious actors from using those vulnerabilities to attack you and target your devices or your organizations and lastly, avoid phishing, quishing, vishing and smishing," he said.