High-quality photos are another area where many hackers are working to actually scrape data and use it for impersonation. This popular method in social hacking can be used to build photos of your likeness. AI technology can generate bodies and create fake images that are convincing using your likeness. A good quality headshot on your profile could be all that someone needs to create a convincing likeness of you for ID or for a wide range of nefarious reasons.
How identity theft and social media are well linked:
As we have found out from the Cambridge analytics case, social media is particularly useful for harvesting data and it often happens without consent. Finding a way into the backend of this information and even influencing choices can be done by a social network hacker easily.
Many people hacking social media accounts are able to steal data and money using profiling to quickly infect a user’s computer with malware or even work at stealing their identity.
As sites like Linkedin and Facebook who normally ask for comprehensive details from customers for job recruitment and connection, it doesn’t take long for a hacker to have an excellent profile of anyone who they could be tracking through social media.
Schemes using social media like LinkedIn have even gone as far as hacker groups speaking to CEOs and having them open up malicious applications that have resulted in nationwide breaches. This instance first occurred in December of 2018 with Lazarus APT and Chilean banks with a skype scam that included details from an employee that were all harvested from his social media webpage.
Can I avoid social media profiling?
If you plan on continuing to use social media and you’d like to avoid profiling it’s important that you use social media with some degree of caution. Treating all of your siliceous contacts with skepticism is an important first step. If you are receiving correspondence from somebody that you don’t know, you need to exercise the proper amount of caution.
Phishing attacks often occur with the cooperation and if you are unwilling to let the script of the hacker carry out and use these contact immediately, you are likely to avoid being scammed.
Make sure that if you are accessing Facebook on the same computer that you access your finances and more, that you have all applicable protections in place to protect against malicious documents and files. A malicious file could be something as simple as opening up a mislabeled PDF from an e-mail. Having an active security solution in place can help to protect your IT infrastructure at home and with any business.
Take a look at the information that you share on social media. Keeping a vague profile and riding the line between making a profile on LinkedIn attractive to potential employers without giving away too much detail is important. Publishing more of your data online makes you more vulnerable.
Conclusions:
Sharing on social media can help us to connect with others and it has made our world a much closer place. What is important to remember before you go on social media or create a profile is to be very careful about the data that you share online. Before we were a connected world it was not unusual to not know the birth date for our coworker, their past job description, their favorite animals or their favorite TV shows. This is not data that you need to share with everyone.
As Hacking social media accounts are only growing more popular, you need to make sure that you can avoid social network hackers by limiting the data you publish online.
