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I love my job as a keynote speaker. To be honored as one of only 570 Certified Speaking Professionals on the planet this past month was icing on the cake, and confirmation that we’d finally made it through that which almost destroyed our family.
Just a few years ago I thought I might go to jail for crimes that someone else committed using my identity. I lost nearly everything, including my business, my reputation and lots of money. Who would have thought then that all of the pain we experienced as a family would be turned into a highly satisfying career as an author and professional keynote speaker? Every day I get to go to work with the enviable conviction of empowering people to protect their privacy from identity theft, social media exposure and human manipulation. I get to steer people and corporations away from making the significant mistakes I did. It is vastly fulfilling.
Posted in Cyber Data Security, Digital Reputation & Trust, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Certified Speaking Professional, CSP, Keynote, National Speakers Association, NSA, Sileo, Speaker
Everybody wants your data. Why? Because it’s profitable, it’s relatively easy to access and the resulting crime is almost impossible to trace. Take, for example, Sony PlayStation Network, Citigroup, Epsilon, RSA, Lockheed and several other businesses that have watched helplessly in the past months as more than 100 million customer records have been breached, ringing up billions in recovery costs and reputation damage. You have so much to lose.
To scammers, your employees’ Facebook profiles are like a user’s manual about how to manipulate their trust and steal your intellectual property. To competitors, your business is one poorly secured smartphone from handing over the recipe to your secret sauce. And to the data spies sitting near you at Starbucks, you are one unencrypted wireless connection away from wishing you had taken the steps in this two-part article.
Posted in Burning Questions (Video), Cyber Data Security, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy, Video Tips by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: "Data Privacy", "Identity Theft, Business Security, data security, Fraud, information, John Sileo, Keynote, Prevention, Privacy, Protection, Security, social engineering, Speaker, Technology
Everybody wants your data, especially when you are in the business of meetings. Your data doesn’t just have a high face value (e.g., the attendee data, including credit card numbers that you collect and store in your online registration system), it also has a high resale value .
Here is how the theft is most often committed in your industry:
- Competitors hire one of your employees and they leave with a thumb drive full of confidential files, including client lists, personally identifying information on talent and employees, financial performance data, etc.
- Social engineers (con artists) mine your employee’s Facebook profiles to gain a heightened level of trust which allows them to manipulate your human assets
- Cyber criminals hack your lax computer network or sniff the unprotected wireless connections you and your employees use while traveling (Starbucks, hotels, airports).
Posted in Cyber Data Security, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Conference Speaker, Conferences, CSAE, data security, Data Security Expert, Identity Theft Speaker, John Sileo, Keynote Speaker, meeting planners, Meeting Professionals, Meeting Security, Meetings, Meetings Industry, MPI, Privacy, Security, SGMP, Society of Government Meeting Professionals
I just finished delivering a keynote speech for the Society of Government Meeting Professionals (SGMP) at their annual convention on identity theft and protecting data in the meetings industry. Data security is a top concern in this industry because it is probably one of the most highly-targeted groups for identity theft, social media fraud, data breach and social engineering. Here’s why:
- Meeting professionals collect, store and transmit massive amounts of private data on attendees
- Data theft risk skyrockets when travel is involved, which is a frequent occurrence for meeting planners and professionals
- Meeting professionals are busy nearly 24 hours a day once they are onsite for the conference or meeting, meaning that they are highly distracted
- A single data breach of attendee data can put the organization responsible for the event out of business due to excessive costs and tight compliance regulations
Posted in Cyber Data Security, Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Conference Speaker, Conferences, CSAE, data security, Data Security Expert, Identity Theft Speaker, John Sileo, Keynote Speaker, meeting planners, Meeting Professionals, Meeting Security, Meetings, Meetings Industry, MPI, Privacy, Security, SGMP, Society of Government Meeting Professionals
A report was recently published claiming that nearly 100,000 Facebook apps have been leaking access codes belonging to millions of users’ profiles. Symantec released the report and said that an app security flaw may have given apps and other third parties access to users’ profiles. Facebook maintains that they have no evidence of this occurring.
In their report, Symantec wrote:
We estimate that as of April 2011, close to 100,000 applications were enabling this leakage. We estimate that over the years, hundreds of thousands of applications may have inadvertently leaked millions of access tokens to third parties.
These “access tokens” help apps interact with your profile.They are most often used to post updates from the application to your wall. When you add the applications to your profile you, as the Facebook user, is giving the apps access to your information by accepting their conditions. According to the investigation, these tokens were included in URLs sent to the application host and were then sent to advertisers and analytics platforms. If the recipient recognized the codes (meaning they have to be qualified to read and write HTML code), they could gain access to the user’s wall’s and profile.
Posted in Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: "Facebook Speaker", Facebook, Facebook apps, Facebook Safety, Facebook Security, John Sileo, Online/Social Media Privacy, Social Media Security, social networking, Social Networking Expert, Social Networking Speaker
At this point, we are all pretty used to the classic Nigerian Scam. Someone who is recently wealthy needs your help to gain access to the funds. They will let you keep $1 million if you will simply send them your bank account number so he can transfer $30 million to you. Its a dream come true to most!
What happens when that same scam is used on Facebook by one of your friends, by someone you trust? The results can be disastrous. One woman was scammed out of $366,000 because she felt sorry for the scammer’s sob story. The woman contacted the local authorities after realizing she had been conned by her Facebook “friend”. Police arrested six male suspects in Kepong, all allegedly connected to the Facebook scam: two Nigerians, two Bangladeshis, and two Malaysians. Investigators only managed to recover $5,000 in cash of the victim’s money, although they also seized 18 ATM cards, seven cell phones, and a laptop.
Posted in Cyber Data Security, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Facebook, Facebook Safety, Facebook Scams, Identity Theft Speaker, John Sileo, Nigerian Scams, social networking, Social Networking Expert, Speaker
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ380SHZvYU[/youtube]
Posted in Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: CIA, Data Mining, Facebook, John Sileo, Onion, Online/Social Media Privacy, social networking, surveillance
How should my business balance the risks of social media with the rewards of this increasingly dominant and highly profitable marketing medium? That’s the very insightful question that a CEO asked me during a presentation I gave on information leadership for a Vistage CEO conference.
Think of your move into social media (Facebook/Fan/Business Pages, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) like you would approach the task of helping your fifteen-year-old daughter prepare to drive on her own. You love her more than anything on earth and would do anything for her (just like you will go to great lengths grow your business), but that doesn’t mean you just hand her the keys. Trying to forbid or ignore the movement into social marketing is like telling your teen that they can’t get their license. It isn’t going to happen, so you might consider putting down the denial and controlling those pieces of change that are within your power. The task is to maximize the positives of her newly bestowed freedom while minimizing any negatives; the same is true in social media.
Posted in Fraud Detection & Prevention, Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Business Fraud, data security, Expert, Facebook, Facebook Risks, John Sileo, linkedin, Online/Social Media Privacy, Privacy, safety, Security, Social Media Business, social networking, Social Networking Business, Social Networking Risks, Speaker, twitter, YouTube
A close friend of mine just had his Facebook account taken over and used for pretty nasty things, so… this is just a quick reminder to change your Facebook password frequently for added security. If you have been a member for years, like most people, and have not ever changed your password, I recommend you do so right now (don’t wait, you’ll never do it later).
On a site like Facebook that houses so much of your personal reputation and information, it is good to keep passwords new and difficult to hack. We see people’s Facebook profiles get hacked every day from clicking on malware and phishing schemes – and once they have your Facebook password, they probably have the same password you use on other accounts. Changing your password frequently, as simple as it sounds, is an easy way to avoid some of the privacy problems posed by Facebook. Once you are logged in, visit your Account Settings Page. On the first page next to Password click change.
Posted in Identity Theft Prevention, Online Privacy by Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo.
Tags: Account Takeover, Change Facebook Password, Change Password, Facebook, Facebook Password, Facebook Safety, Facebook Safety Survival Guide, Fraud, identity theft expert, malware, Online/Social Media Privacy, Password, Security, social networking
