WATCH Social Media Security – Day 17 of Cybersecurity Awareness Month
Mike Miller
Craig, if you asked me 20 years ago, whether people be scrolling through social media for hours each day, I told you, you’re crazy. You know, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Tiktok. They’ve taken the world by storm. And there’s so much information about us online today, it just starts to worry me. Is my fear misplaced? Or should I be worried about social media accounts and what they contain?
Craig Taylor
Mike, you’re right to be concerned. As you said, social media is only been around for 20 years or less. And the norms, quite frankly, don’t exist for what you should and shouldn’t post online. Add to that our schools aren’t educating our students, your children, my children, and the media is not educating us on the on on these things. What you should shouldn’t post. sure they’re talking about sexting and cyberbullying, in commercials and with the students. But that’s just a small fraction of the risks of social media online today to all of us.
Mike Miller
You’re right, Craig. Yeah, I’ve seen the the videos commercials about cyberbullying and sexting. But is that all the rest of there are, what other risks are there?
Craig Taylor
Well, honestly, there’s so many we we’ve taken the initiative to create the top eight risks for social media security at CyberHoot here. So I’d like to go through each of those briefly with you today. Okay, let’s start with physical security. If you’re heading out on vacation, don’t publish when you’re going. If you must share do so after you get home, take those great pictures share where you went, but don’t do it before you leave. Otherwise, when you get home, your home will be full of a lot less stuff.
As people will break it, don’t publish number two. Tip number two is don’t publish where you’re staying, as you could endanger yourself or your family. And this is especially true if you’re a government official, or if your CEO or a famous person. There’s just a lot of kidnapping, especially in third world countries. So don’t publish where you’re going and when you’ll be there.
On the personal data side, you know, criminals fake create a lot of fake accounts. Sometimes that’s to share disinformation, as we’ve seen recently in the election in the United States. But other times, it’s to create a believable profile to make friends requests that you’ll accept. And in so doing, they get access to your birthday, your hobbies, your likes and dislikes. And they use that information to put a very specific spear phishing attack against you together to convince you and compromise you and your personal accounts and data. Another reason for those social media accounts is that it allows them to post fake links to malicious websites, which if you click those links, and visit those websites, they actually can try to attack your computer, if you’re missing a patch or two, you might be compromised in that way.
Or they might try to steal your credentials. When you get to a website, it says you need to log in with your Microsoft or your Google account credentials, they’re going to steal that and then they have access to your email. So that’s a very important malware attack protection is is really important there. Tip number five is sharing too much information. Don’t share anything that you wouldn’t publish on the 6pm news in your social media accounts, especially if you’re publishing it to everyone in the world.
If you if you you could take a little more liberties with your friends so long as you’re choosy about who you accept in as a friend in your social media accounts. There are … did you know there are even professional services now where an employer can hire someone to do a social media background check no different than a criminal background check or financial or an educational background check companies.
And I do this when I’m looking to hire someone I look at their social media backgrounds to see what kinds of things are they sharing? Do they post that they’re always calling in sick on Mondays because they had so much fun on the weekend, I wouldn’t hire that person over another equally qualified candidate. The next tip is around privacy settings.
Always limit your post to your immediate friends. Not everyone. Keep your profile as private as possible. So that gets back to the earlier point. Don’t accept all these friends requests and limit your post to just your friends. Not only that, but limit your application access when you have these social media applications on your mobile device.
Many of them want to listen in on your conversations and they asked to access your microphone and your camera and your location data. You need to say no to all of those because if you do accept all of that, then they may send you a barrage of advertisements from all time they monetize your data and they sell it to target and other companies of the world to market to you with sales and advertisements. So limiting that data is really good tip. The final tip today
Tip Number eight is to protect your social media accounts from compromise by setting A strong password that’s at least 14 characters in length doesn’t have to be uppercase, lowercase and complex just needs to be 14 or more characters in length. And then you need to add multifactor or two factor authentication to your account so that if you’re at a friend’s house and you go to log into your Facebook or tik tok account, you’re coming from a novel computer, Facebook and tick tock, we’ll say, we’ve never seen it before coming from this location. Let us text you a code to get you in today. It’s that simple. If you’re on your regular everyday computer, you might not get that code each and every time you log in. So set up multi factor authentication. Those are the tips for protecting yourself online and social media today.
Mike Miller
Okay, okay. We have those here. Yeah,
Craig Taylor
So in summary, don’t publish when you’re heading out of town, or where you’re going. Limit your friend requests that to the people that you know, beware of untrusted links. Don’t share things you wouldn’t want seen on the nightly news. Limit posts, only your friends not everyone, limit permissions in the apps on your phone so they can’t access your microphone, camera and location and use a strong password paired with 2FA. You do these things. You can stay safe online today. Generally speaking.
Top 8 Tips for Social Media Security / Safety
