With several posts highlighting how prevalent social media is in our world today, and with the most recent class lecture discussing cyber security, I decided to explore and see if the two were related. After digging around, I found that the two are more connected than I originally thought. First, the frequent use of social media certainly does not deter cyberattackers from hacking profiles. According to an article published earlier this year by Pew Research Center, 70% of Facebook users are on the website on a daily basis. The more a user is on the website, the more friends and activity will occur, which can create a target for cyberhackers. Furthermore, Facebook released a statement in 2011 that out of the one billion daily log-ons, about 0.06% of them are “compromised” by cyberattacks. This statement, as addressed in a NY Daily News publication, approximates about 600,000 accounts are hacked everyday. Since then, Facebook has significantly improved their security measures, but attacks are still happening.
On another note, one may be asking, “Why social media sites?” For Facebook specifically, its popularity and recent addition of payment options through Facebook Messenger makes it an attractive choice. By simply hacking a username and password, hackers can have access to their phone number, address, and even credit card number if that account has a payment method set up. There is a humorous side to this as well: hackers have a tendency to break into high-profile companies for inappropriate posts. These situations are infamously connected with Twitter, with several Forbes 500 companies being the victim to inappropriate hackers (for examples, go to http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2013-02-20/so-your-corporate-twitter-accounts-been-hacked). While laughable, this type of cyber attacks can damage a corporation’s marketing strategy and public image.
So what can you do to protect yourself on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram? A few personal tips includes the obvious never give out your username info, change your password a few times a year, and to never put more personal information than needed. Other not-so-straightforward tips that I suggest are to always log out of your profile if you are using a public computer and to keep different passwords for different accounts. Leaving your profile logged-in leaves you susceptible to others managing your account. Also, by using different passwords for different social media platforms, it will limit the damage in case one of your accounts are hacked. What are some other tips that we can do to protect our social media accounts? Do you think social media hacking will get worse or improve in the next few years?
Sources:
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/frequency-of-social-media-use-2/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/sungardas/2015/02/24/why-hackers-love-companies-who-use-social-media/
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/03/send-money-to-friends-in-messenger/
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/facebook-hack-attacks-strike-600k-times-day-article-1.968681
Cyber Security in social media and social networks is very important issue but still we do not pay enough attention to it. Why? Because we do not really value information that we publish on Web. In addition, more and more services and applications request personal information and store them online. The invention of various forms of online payments (PayPal, Apple pay, Android pay, Kiwi) also increases our chances to be hacked. Therefore, I conclude that the cyber security media hacking will worsen in the next few years.
Another thing that I would like to point out is hacking techniques. It is not surprise that all our logins and emails are stored online in various databases. Hackers have come up with a technique where they simply steal information from those databases. But this is not the worse thing that could happen to us. Hackers go further. They construct databases with thousands and millions emails (wordlists) and run programs that try to login to hack your email by taking a single email and applying each password from a database of passwords. Eventually, if you have the same password for a particular website and your email account, your email can be easily hacked. This is of course is a brute forced technique taking significant amount of time, but studies show that it actually works. Therefore, one of the tips to avoid being hacked is to change your passwords for each website periodically. More information can be found here: http://www.darknet.org.uk/2008/02/password-cracking-wordlists-and-tools-for-brute-forcing/. Also, one of the tips is simply quit all unnecessary social networks and just enjoy your life. This will not only decrease your chances of being hacked, but it will also give you more time to live.
I think hacking could possibly get worse. With the internet of things becoming more prominent in today’s society, I think there is a greater ability for information to be accessed. I remember in class when we were talking about the Internet of Things and how our personal information will be used more throughout our daily lives. It’s almost scary to think that overtime, we will have less and less privacy because we already don’t have very much. Going off of your question about what we can do to keep things private, I would say to just not put so much information about ourselves on social media.
I found this video online that I remembered talking about in my ethics class. It was about hackers on social media and how information can easily be hacked. The premise of the video was this guy in European countries was telling people that he was a psychic and when he presented his clients with information about their daily life, he was correct. In reality, he had a team of hackers behind him searching all of their social media sites and was able to find all of his information that way; he was even able to find some one’s credit card number. Even though that was an extreme case, it is still possible that this information can be found by complete strangers and with the ever changing technology, I think that it can only get easier for people to find more things.
Here is the link of the video, it’s pretty interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7pYHN9iC9I
I think now a days this is a huge up and coming issue that needs to definitely be taken into consideration when making social media accounts. Facebook and Twitter are two of the many social media accounts that Hackers go after. I took a privacy class when I was in high school and it taught us that hackers have the ability to go around any privacy settings you think you have.
Some attacks use fake accounts on social media websites to establish trusting relationships that lead to the attacker stealing passwords and sensitive information from who they are talking to.
Personally my best friend from high school had someone who was luring her to send him more information about herself and trying to hack into her computer at the same time through Facebook. Luckily her boyfriend knew some of the hacking signs from what he learned in some of his classes and was able to track the account down to be a hacker and realize that the attacker was trying to get personal information off of her computer.
Another one of my friends has found social media accounts that use her pictures with a different name. This just proves that you can never trust who you are really talking to on the other side of the computer because it might not be who you really think it is. I also think that cybersecurity is lacking because people tag me in spam or send me messages with links and such that I know are junk and that people want to try to hack into my account by making me click on the link that they send.
Cybersecurity is a huge issue and through being in college and having tons of pictures I have realized that regardless of the privacy settings on my social media applications, nothing that I ever post is completely private and that someone can easily hack in and see my information. Celebrities and companies get hacked all the time, one more notably being that someone hacked into Burger Kings Twitter (@BurgerKing) and changed their name and avatar to the McDonalds logo. Another notable hack is Fox News being hacked and saying that the President of the United States was dead. Hacks happen all the time not only to us but to everyone who is using social media.
http://www.securityweek.com/next-big-cybercrime-vector-social-media
http://www.refinedguy.com/2013/10/22/23-hilarious-celebrity-twitter-hacks/#7
I think as college students, social media is one of the largest channels through which we expose our information online. It seems the most that we do is make our instagram accounts private or hide our Facebook pages from the public. However, hackers can get around some of these privacy settings. It seems that once we turn on those settings, we are invincible to hackers, but that’s not the case. I read an interesting Forbes article called, “Let’s Face It, We Don’t Really Care About Our Privacy.” The main things mentioned in the article where how often massive data breaches were happening in today’s world and how we still risk putting our personal information on multiple sites. If people were asked about how much they care about their privacy, a lot of them would probably say they care a lot. However, I think with the simplicity of sharing our information online, we don’t truly think about what we’re doing. The article mentions that we choose to use credit cards and put our credit card information online to buy things because it is more convenient. We choose to connect with others and share information on social media because it is convenient and cheap. In my BA 342 class a few weeks ago, the professor made a good point about how often people skip through the privacy policies and terms of condition on websites and mobile applications. I think your personal tips were helpful, because it is very difficult to not use the internet for shopping and connecting with others at all. We just need to be aware and make the effort to keep our information private.
Cyber security is always a big concern not only to individual but also company. Especially with nowadays massive use of social media. There is more and more information online about us everyday. Not only hackers and hack the account to have access to personal id information or credit card information. Some companies are also buying these informations to find out their target customers or tracking people purchase idea. This kind of behavior will make most of us uncomfortable. The feeling of being tracked and watched and also at the risk of loosing finance control is very creepy. Increasing cyber security is definitely a major topic.
Also from the recent news, target was having a major data leakage also, which not only seriously harm the company’s reputation, but also put a lot customer at financial risk. Furthermore, also mentioned in the article, hackers can harm reputation by hacking into company’s social account. Therefore, company also need to look into cyber security .
Your post is interesting. it is something we should all know and expect, but also something that needs to be said and put out there. To add my two-cents to everything, I would like to point out a few things. A good amount of the population today is on at least one form of social media. The average person might even have 2, 3, or even 4 accounts on various social media outlets. The most common ones might include instagram, facebook, twitter, snapchat, and tumblr, just to name a few. This is just what is “trending” in our sociality today. To have virtual profiles and identities to easily communicate to anyone around the world. Remember in class when we talked about Penn State’s IST college database hack by the Chinese? This is somewhat similar to that. Essentially, Penn state’s social media is the database, that we have on high security and keep very private. Then the Chinese comes along and lurks on our “social media” for a long time without us even knowing. This is exactly one way that it happens in the real world. People hack into our accounts and sits there to watch our every moves, or to do things under our name and act like its us. But then how about those people that do not have social media? And know nothing about it? This can harm them because hackers, or anyone in general, can just create an account and literally be them. They will never be caught because the person they’re portraying is not on social media and never checks it. This way you can be whoever you are physically, but through the internet and through a screen you can be seen as a totally different person.