Through the years, we have written about privacy issues more than 100 times. Involving both B2C and B2B situations. And we know that matters keep getting worse. Yes, the practices of hackers are despicable. Nonetheless, we need to take more accountability for our own actions. Thus, today’s topic is handling our online privacy better.
Especially with Social Media: Handling Our Online Privacy Better
Not to pick on anyone. 🙂 But do YOU do any of these things through your social media? Provide your birthday or exact location? Make posts when you are away — while saying that you are away? Allow people you barely know to “friend” you? Present photos that could be embarrassing? Etc. Etc.
If your answer to any of the above is yes, you must exhibit more self control. Otherwise, you may be subjecting yourself to an unwanted invasion of privacy and the resultant misbehavior of the hackers.
How bad are things? And what should we do?
Background
According to an article by Heidi Mitchell for the Wall Street Journal:
That cute photo of your fluffy Lagotto Romagnolo on Instagram. The TikTok video of your team finally back together in the office. An alma mater highlighted on your LinkedIn page. Armed with all that publicly available intel, a cybercriminal can cobble together a profile of you — and use it in countless ways to break into your company’s network.
They might craft an E-mail tailored to your interests (“Hello fellow dog lover!”) that gets you to click on a dubious link, inadvertently giving them access to the network, or insider details about service providers like your health-insurance company. So they can launch a ransomware attack. Or they might pretend to be you to trap somebody else at your business (“Hey, it’s Cindy’s birthday next week, click on this link to accept the invite to her party.”). And so on.
“About 60% of the information I need to craft a really good spear phish is found on Instagram alone,” says Rachel Tobac, chief executive of SocialProof Security, a hacker-led vulnerability-assessment and training firm. “I can usually find everything I need within the first 30 minutes or so.”
It isn’t just things that you post, either. “Every ‘like’ you make on Facebook and heart you tap on Instagram can be aggregated together to paint a fairly clear picture of who you are and what you are into,” says Carrie Gardner, a cybersecurity engineer and leader of the Insider Risk Team at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute.
Tips for YOU
If you want to reduce the potential for hackers to attack YOU online, follow these tips from Mitchell. And click the image below to read details regarding each tip:
- Think twice about what you post. Then think again.
- Stop sharing your work E-mail.
- Use different profile pictures on different platforms.
- Keep your cool on dating sites.
- Sanitize your online CV (resume).
- Vet people before accepting requests.
