The dawn of social media has brought valuable information – that should otherwise be kept private – right into the public eye. Is what you share online the biggest cybersecurity risk you face?
So much of your daily life is available, for free, to those willing to tap a few keys on a keyboard.
You check into a building, talk about where you work, complain about your commute home and, largely, put out a readable description of your everyday life.
You post pictures of yourself, selfie after selfie, with each image allowing someone to duplicate, store and reuse it.
And the online world with which you share your endless streams of trivial, personal information is exactly where hackers lie in wait. So, ask yourself, are you doing their job for them?
Cybersecurity, a socially-engineered discipline
Socially-engineered cyberattacks are no more common now than they were in the past, from even before scams went online. Rather than a mass phishing exercise, scammers can instead adapt their attack to you.
For example, a series of cyberattacks on customers of small banks on the east coast of the US late last year saw hackers time their moves, hone in on incredibly local venues and, as a result, increase their success rate markedly.
This is not a rare occurrence and, thanks to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn (among others) it can only get easier for hackers, unless you rein it in a little.
This infographic from Digital Guardian explains some of the risks we all face today.
Social media image via Shutterstock
