Facebook identity thefts are nothing new. The social media site has been the vehicle for all sorts of fake links and bots in years past. But a new trick that could threaten your digital reputation is proving particularly insidious.
If you get a message to “Experience Facebook Black” sometime soon, you’d be advised to turn it down, unless you’re OK with your digital reputation being hijacked. This latest hack could spread malicious software without you or your Facebook friends even knowing until it’s too late.
The scam allegedly works by offering users the chance to change the color of the Facebook background to black – and then asks for users to respond to a series of questions by giving out information. Of course, the promised color conversion is a lie: play into the hands of this fraud and you’ll just wind up as a means of spreading it further, with your information used to make a dummy page to trick your connections.
Social media seems to be all about spreading the love. If you like something, you show it by clicking the 'like' button, no questions asked. For most people, it stops there – but not for Facebook.
Everything you do online gets noticed by someone, and even the most minor of digital movements can have repercussions you aren't aware of. A perfect example of this is the "like" feature of Facebook. It seems harmless enough, but a recent study demonstrated that there are unseen depths to it that you might not know about. Every "like" is a new piece of data that can be strung together with the rest of your online information, creating a picture of you that is scarily accurate.
Remember those strikes against Facebook, Apple and Microsoft a few weeks ago? New data has given us a little more info on where these attacks came from.
Even if you think you've locked your private information down, social media exposure is always a risk. We already knew a little bit about the source of the breach that recently compromised Facebook and other major companies. Now we have the name of one of the websites that launched the hack: iPhoneDevSDK.com, a mobile app development site that acted as a "watering hole" for malware. It was only one of many, however, and the source of these attacks is still somewhat murky.
The name of the particular species of malware that infiltrated Macs has also been identified. According to the Security Ledger, it's called Pintsized.A, and it's a Trojan that can disguise itself as an innocuous file while subtly corrupting your device. The attacks were disseminated through the use of a critical security loophole in Java, something that has been a source of criticism for cyber security professionals in the past.
Viruses are the biological weapons of the internet: once someone gets infected, it's only a matter of time before the contagion starts to spread. Evenasocial media giant like Facebook isn't immune to the kinds of digital "superbugs" that cause data security breaches.
You would think that corporate titans – with their advanced defenses – would be most immune to the effects of malware, but the reality is that the bigger the service provider, the more vulnerable it can be to hackers and cybercriminals. Recently, we saw Twitter get hit with a massive hack that targeted the data of a quarter-million people. Now, Facebook has been victimized by a vicious strain of software.
Last Friday, Facebook security posted a statement on its blog detailing what it called a "sophisticated attack" on its system that occurred in January.
Get this. A new study says that your Facebook status updates are more memorable to people today than carefully crafted lines from a book. If that’s not proof that social media exposure has real impact and an insanely long shelf-life, I don’t know what is.
A team of psychologists from the University of California published their research in the academic journal “Memory and Cognition.” They collected hundreds of Facebook posts from undergraduate research assistants and the same number of random phrases from recently published books sold on Amazon.
They made sure that the specific context was taken out so that the status updates and book excerpts stood completely on their own. Study participants were asked to memorize them. As it turns out, those Facebook statuses we throw up all willy-nilly stick with a person 1.5 times more than the words written by published authors.
This was a statement made by a 22-year-old individual participating in a panel discussion about Generation Y and online privacy at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) currently taking place in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Slamming your head in a car door hurts, so we don't do it. Exposing dangerous amounts of our private information also hurts, but because we don't feel the pain instantaneously, we tend to ignore it all together. Our risk attention span is about 30 seconds, or about as long as it takes to read a 140-character tweet.
The CES panel was composed of six young adults between the ages of 18 and 28. Each individual made some very important points about social media exposure and their use of the Web.
"I don't believe that if I were to turn [my social networks] off that people wouldn't be able to get my info. It's already out there," said Tess, one of the Gen Y-ers.
America’s top Privacy & Identity Theft Speaker John Sileo has appeared on 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper, Fox & in front of audiences including the Department of Defense, Pfizer, Homeland Security and hundreds of corporations and associations of all sizes. His high-content, humorous, audience-interactive style delivers all of the expertise with lots of entertainment. Come ready to laugh and learn about this mission-critical, bottom-line enhancing topic.
John Sileo is an award-winning author and keynote speaker on the dark art of deception (identity theft, fraud training, data privacy, social media manipulation) and its polar opposite, the powerful use of trust, to achieve success. He is CEO of The Sileo Group, which advises teams on how to multiply performance by building a culture of deep trust.
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