the victim had met through social media or a local online group.
Data Exhaust
The second scenario has several possible attack vectors: a poorly chosen, easily cracked webmail password; a data breach of the webmail server; or the reuse of a password from a second site that has been breached. The really dangerous element is that many people store everything in a single webmail account, including the security information for all their other accounts.
Social media consultant Suw Charman- Anderson adds genealogy sites as a risk because her name is uncommon and her family tree is easy to identify. But how about this perennial social media game: ‘What’s your porn star name?’ In one common version you pair the name of your fi rst pet and your mother’s maiden name. It seems silly and harmless until you make the connection that password reset security questions – and banks – often ask for those same two pieces of information. Once someone has cracked your one-
size-fi ts-all email account, says Charman- Anderson, you are in for a “world of hurt”. In the worst case, your identity is completely compromised and it takes you years to get it back and repair the reputational damage. “Wrestling back control of your accounts will be horrendous.” People need, she adds, to be aware of their “data exhaust” – that is, the information you don’t realize or remember you’re shedding. Fake psychics have conned people for centuries by exploiting this exact principle.
The Dark Side of Social Media Trend Micro’s Dancer sees the church meeting as an early sign that online identity fraud is crossing over into the physical world. This threat can move from the well- trained employees of security companies to the less aware staff at suppliers, customers, or partners who think their companies have nothing worth such effort.
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“As soon as you have real-world contact, then social networking impersonation becomes trivial”, Dancer says. He also notes privacy externalities: your privacy can be compromised by others, such as the newly appointed head of MI6 or the CIA, whose wife had casually posted their home address online.
In research into his next book – on social media for educators – Frederick Lane has uncovered many instances of identity fraud perpetrated against teachers, usually, but not always, by their students using social networks. “Teachers have been dealing with identity theft and hijacking in social media to an extent I hadn’t realized”, he says. “I almost want to applaud the creativity of the kids, but it’s pretty scary what they can do – and district leaders don’t understand the technology that well, so they rush to judgment against the teachers.” In sample cases, a fake Facebook page set up in the name of a teacher in Bloomington, Minnesota, was used to send ‘inappropriate’ messages to students. The fake Twitter feed set up on behalf of a teacher at a special needs school in Panama City, Flordia, posted derogatory comments about autistic kids, attracting emailed complaints from all over the world.
In August 2011, the Facebook account belonging to an Australian teacher and prominent anti-racism campaigner was
So the problem with feeding false data to profiles is the illusion of security – the risk that those people start saying more than they would otherwise
Suw Charman- Anderson
hacked by white supremacists – probably not by students – apparently to discredit the teacher. “I could have come up with many more”, Lane says.
The Illusion of Privacy In general, he adds, the severity of consequences to the teachers is directly related to how technology-savvy their administrators are. The damage is often considerable regardless because, “these cases instantly hit the headlines and the parents freak out”. That’s the problem; so what’s the solution? For many individuals, jettisoning social media would mean destroying their social lives as effectively as if they refused to set foot in a pub. Companies cannot expect millions of employees to curtail their social contacts every day, as if we were all potentially being watched by Gestapo spies. As Rik Ferguson, TrendMicro’s director of security research and communications in EMEA, says, “the risk comes from just acting like a normal person”.
But a large part of the problem comes from the illusion that setting privacy controls means you’re ‘among friends’. Instead, always assume, say both Ferguson and Dancer, that everything you post is public. “If you always operate by that principle, your worries are minimized from the outset”, Ferguson contends. In addition, “protect anything you do share from being publicly indexed and reaching a wider audience than you intended”. Many people, he adds, mistakenly overlook LinkedIn’s fundamental nature as a social network. “There’s really no difference at all, and in a targeted attack, the information available on LinkedIn often has a lot more value than stuff on Twitter or Facebook”, Ferguson notes. “On LinkedIn, people post their entire career history, expose professional links between themselves and other people, what projects they worked on, when, and for how long. In terms of constructing a credible email with a link you hope they’ll click on to infect a
January/February 2012
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