Tag Archive for: Facebook

Facebook Breach: Zuckerberg Karma & Your Stolen Cell #

Facebook Breach

The Facebook Breach Might Not Be What You’re Thinking

How many Facebook user records were just breached? The answer might surprise you.

Zero.

That’s right, the 533 million records that were “scraped” off in the recent-headline-grabbing Facebook breach actually disappeared from their website in 2018 and 2019. Not 2021.

It’s just that Facebook never told us. Never notified us per standard procedure. We found out when the data was posted to a free hacking forum on the dark web.

The breach compromised the personal data of more than half a billion Facebook users including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birth dates, bios and in some cases email addresses. Yes, that’s right, all of those spam calls you get on your mobile phone might be due to the Facebook breach. Even Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s cellphone number was part of the hack!

Although the data has been floating around for two years, the way the data was sorted and posted on a free hacking forum this week makes it far more accessible for criminals to exploit. And, although some data for the affected people may have changed in two years, it could still be of value to hackers and cyber criminals like those who engage in identify theft.

What to do?

  1. Never put your real phone number, address or birthdate into Facebook in the first place. Use a Google Voice number if you must.
  2. Change your password in Facebook regularly, even though you no longer have to on most sites.
  3. If you turn on two-step logins, don’t give your cell phone number, as it will be breached. Give the Google Voice number.
  4. See if you were included in this hack by entering your email into HaveIBeenPwned.com. Do you see Facebook there? I hope not.
  5. When you’ve had enough, delete your Facebook account.

John Sileo is a cybersecurity expert, privacy advocate, award-winning author and media personality as seen on 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper and Fox & Friends. He keynotes conferences virtually and in person around the world. John is the CEO of The Sileo Group, a business think tank based in Colorado.

Private Eyes Are Watching You: What it Means to Live (and Be Watched) in the Surveillance Economy

What it is the Surveillance Economy

How do you feel about the fact that Facebook knows your weight, your height, your blood pressure, the dates of your menstrual cycle, when you have sex and maybe even whether you got pregnant? Even when you’re not on Facebook, the company is still tracking you as you move across the internet. It knows what shape you’re in from the exercise patterns on your fitness device, when you open your Ring doorbell app and which articles you check out on YouTube — or more salacious sites. 

Welcome to the surveillance economy — where our personal data and online activity are not only tracked but sold and used to manipulate us. As Shoshana Zuboff, who coined the term surveillance capitalism, recently wrote, “Surveillance capitalism begins by unilaterally staking a claim to private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data. Our lives are rendered as data flows.” In other words, in the vast world of internet commerce, we are the producers and our digital exhaust is the product. 

It didn’t have to be this way. Back when the internet was in its infancy, the government could have regulated the tech companies but instead trusted them to regulate themselves. Over two decades later, we’re just learning about the massive amounts of personal data these tech giants have amassed, but it’s too late to put the genie back in the bottle. 

The game is rigged. We can’t live and compete and communicate without the technology, yet we forfeit all our rights to privacy if we take part. It’s a false choice. In fact, it’s no choice at all. You may delete Facebook and shop at the local mall instead of Amazon, but your TV, fridge, car and even your bed may still be sharing your private data. 

As for self-regulation, companies may pay lip service to a public that is increasingly fed up with the intrusiveness, but big tech and corporate America continue to quietly mine our data. And they have no incentive to reveal how much they’re learning about us. In fact, the more they share the knowledge, the lower their profits go. 

This is one of those distasteful situations where legislation and regulation are the only effective ways to balance the power. Because as individuals, we can’t compete with the knowledge and wallet of Google, Facebook and Amazon. David versus Goliath situations like this were the genesis of government in the first place. But in 2020, can we rely on the government to protect us? 

Unlikely. At least for now. For starters, federal government agencies and local law enforcement use the same technology (including facial recognition software) for collecting data and to track our every move. And unfortunately, those who make up the government are generally among the new knowledge class whose 401Ks directly benefit by keeping quiet while the tech giants grow. Plus, there are some real benefits to ethical uses of the technology (think tracking terrorists), making regulation a difficult beast to tackle. But it’s well worth tackling anyway, just as we’ve done with nuclear submarines and airline safety.

In a recent Pew study, 62% of Americans said it was impossible to go through daily life without companies collecting data about them, and 81% said the risks of companies collecting data outweigh the benefits. The same number said they have little or no control over the data companies collect. 

At some stage, consumers will get fed up and want to take back control from the surveillance economy, and the pendulum will swing, as it already has in Europe, where citizens have a toolbox full of privacy tools to prevent internet tracking, including the right to be forgotten by businesses. Europe’s General Data Protection Rule (GDPR) is a clear reminder that consumers do retain the power, but only if they choose to. It’s not inevitable that our every move and personal data are sold to the highest bidder. We’ve happily signed on, logged in and digitized our way to this point. 

When consumers (that means you) are outraged enough, the government will be forced to step in. Unfortunately, at that point, the regulation is likely to be overly restrictive, and both sides will wish we’d come to some compromise before we wrecked the system. 

In the meantime, you have three basic choices: 

  1. Decrease your digital exhaust by eliminating or limiting the number of social media sites, devices and apps you use. (I know, I know. Not likely.)
  2. Change your privacy and security defaults on each device, app and website that collects your personal information. (More likely. But it takes a time investment and doesn’t fully solve privacy leakage.)
  3. Give in. Some people are willing to bet that a loss of privacy will never come back to haunt them. That’s exactly the level of complacency big tech companies have instilled in us using neuroscience for the past decade.  

Loss of privacy is a slippery slope, and it’s important to take the issue seriously before things get worse. Left unchecked, the private eyes watching your every move could go from tracking your exercise habits and sex life (as if that’s not creepy enough) to meddling with your ability to get health insurance or a mortgage. And suddenly it won’t seem so harmless anymore.


About Cybersecurity Keynote Speaker John Sileo

John Sileo is the founder and CEO of The Sileo Group, a privacy and cybersecurity think tank, in Lakewood, Colorado, and an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and expert on technology, surveillance economy, cybersecurity and tech/life balance.

 

12 Days to a Safe Christmas: Day 5 – Don’t Tell Facebook You Won’t Be Home for the Holidays

Holiday Security Tips: On the fifth day of Christmas, the experts gave to me, 5 Facebook fixes

In general, we share too much information on social media sites. During the holidays, we are positively intoxicated with the giving spirit! Without thinking, we share our holiday travel plans, click on seemingly charitable links or post pictures of a fun night out. And when you share with friends on Facebook, you are sharing with their friends and ultimately, most of the literate world. The problem is, some of those people aren’t really friends and only want to separate you from your holiday dollars.

Solution:  Apply these five fixes to ALL of your social sharing (not just Facebook)

  1. Customize your privacy settings. Sixty percent of social network users are unaware that their default privacy settings let others into most of their personal information. Facebook does a decent job of explaining how to lock your privacy down(https://www.facebook.com/help/privacy) but you must spend at least 90 minutes going over the settings to properly protect yourself.
  2. Protect your passwords. Don’t let the bad guys take over your account and contact your friends as if they were you. Create a unique, strong, alpha-numeric-symbol password without using a dictionary word, birthdate, pet’s name or other personal identifier. Use this password only for a single site and don’t share it with anyone. Be careful of using your Facebook login for other sites, as those sites gain access to your private information.
  3. Log into Facebook only ONCE each session. If it looks like Facebook is asking you to log in a second time, skip the links and directly type www.facebook.com into your browser address bar. Phishing emails and social media posts will often send you to sites that look like Facebook but act like a data criminal. When in doubt, log out.
  4. Beware of free offers, big discounts and requests for charity (even if they come from your friends). If the offer in the post is too enticing, too good to be true or too bad to be real, don’t click. Chances are pretty good that your friend’s account has been hijacked and the hacker is serving you a warm dish of malware. If the post is out of character for that friend, email them and ask if it’s real.
  5. Don’t check in when you aren’t home and don’t post your travel plans. Based on social media feeds and locational check-in services alone (Foursquare), it is simple to map your whereabouts and signal thieves when you aren’t home. If you have to let friends know where you are during the holidays, send a group text or email.

No matter if you’re headin’ home for the holidays or off to Whoville, remember to post your pictures and tell those tales AFTER you’re safely home. On the sixth day of Christmas…

To review our tips from previous days, click here.


About Cybersecurity Keynote Speaker John Sileo

John Sileo is the founder and CEO of The Sileo Group, a cybersecurity think tank, in Lakewood, Colorado, and an award-winning author, keynote speaker and expert on technology, cybersecurity, and tech/life balance. He energizes conferences, corporate trainings and main-stage events by making security fun and engaging. His clients include the Pentagon, Schwab, and organizations of all sizes. John got started in cybersecurity when he lost everything, including his $2 million business, to cybercrime. Since then, he has shared his experiences on 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper, and even while cooking meatballs with Rachel Ray. Contact John directly to see how he can customize his presentations to your audience.

6 Ways Your Facebook Privacy Is Compromised | Sileo Group

One billion people worldwide use Facebook to share the details of their lives with their friends and may be unaware their Facebook Privacy could be compromised. Trouble is, they also might be unintentionally divulging matters they consider private to co-workers, clients and employers.

Worse yet, they may be sharing their privacy with marketing companies and even scammers, competitors and identity thieves. Luckily, with some Facebook privacy tips, you can help protect your account online.

Here are six ways Facebook could be compromising your private information and how to protect yourself:

 

1.  The new Timeline format brings old lapses in judgment back to light. Timeline, introduced in late 2011, makes it easy for people to search back through your old Facebook posts, something that was very difficult to do in the past. That could expose private matters and embarrassing photos that you’ve long since forgotten posting.

What to do: Review every entry on your Facebook timeline. To hide those you do not wish to be public, hold the cursor over the post, click the pencil icon that appears in the upper right corner, select “Edit or remove” then “Hide from timeline.” Being able to “revise” your history gives you a second chance to eliminate over-sharing or posts made in poor taste.

2.  Facebook third-party app providers can harvest personal details about you—even those you specifically told Facebook you wished to be private. Third-party apps are software applications available through Facebook but actually created by other companies. These include games and quizzes popular on Facebook like FarmVille and Words with Friends, plus applications like Skype, TripAdvisor and Yelp. Most Facebook apps are free—the companies that produce them make their money by harvesting personal details about users from their Facebook pages, then selling that information to advertisers. In other words, you are paying for the right to use Facebook using the currency of your personal information.

Many apps collect only fairly innocuous information—things like age, hometown and gender that are probably not secret. But others dig deep into Facebook data, even accessing information specifically designated as private.

Example: A recent study found that several Facebook quiz game apps collected religious affiliations, political leanings and sexual orientations. Many Facebook apps also dig up personal info from our friends’ Facebook pages—even if those friends don’t use the apps. There’s no guarantee that the app providers will sufficiently safeguard our personal information and there are numerous instances where they have done just the opposite.

What to do: Read user agreements and privacy policies carefully to understand what information you are agreeing to share before signing up for any app. The free Internet tool Privacyscore is one way to evaluate the privacy policies of the apps you currently use (www.facebook.com/privacyscore), but remember that it is provided by the very company that is collecting all of your data. You also can tighten privacy settings. In “Facebook Privacy Settings,” scroll down to “Ads, Apps and Websites,” then click “Edit Settings.” Find “Apps You Use” and click “Edit Settings” again to see your privacy options. And be sure to delete any apps you don’t use. While you are in the privacy settings, take a spin around to find out other data you are sharing that might compromise your privacy.

3.  Facebook “like” buttons are spying on you—even when you don’t click them. Each time you click a “like” button on a Web site, you broadcast your interest in a subject not just to your Facebook friends but also to Facebook and its advertising partners.

Example: Repeatedly “like” articles in a publication with a specific political viewpoint, and Facebook advertisers might figure out how you vote.

Not clicking “like” buttons won’t free you from this invasion of privacy. If you’re a Facebook user and you visit a Webpage that has a “like” button, Facebook will record that you visited even if you don’t click “like.” Facebook claims to keep Web browsing habits private, but once information is collected, there’s no guarantee that it won’t get out.

Example: If an insurance company purchases this data, it might discover that someone applying for health coverage has visited Web pages about an expensive-to-treat medical disorder. The insurer might then find an excuse to deny this person coverage, or to raise their rates substantially.

What to do: One way to prevent Facebook from knowing where you go online is to set your Web browser to block all cookies. Each browser has a different procedure for doing this, and it will mean that you will have to re-enter your user ID and password each time you visit certain Web sites.

Another option is to browse the web in “InPrivate Browsing” mode (Internet Explorer), “Incognito” mode (Google Chrome) or “Private Browsing” mode (Firefox and Safari), which seems to be a less intrusive way to raise your privacy levels.

Less conveniently, you could log out of Facebook and select “delete all cookies” from your browser’s privacy settings before visiting Web sites you don’t want Facebook to know about. There are also free plug-ins available to prevent Facebook from tracking you around the Internet, such as Facebook Blocker (webgraph.com/resources/facebookblocker).

4.  Social readers” tell your Facebook friends too much about your reading habits. Some sites, including the Washington Post and England’s The Guardian, offer “Social Reader” Facebook tools. If you sign up for one, it will tell your Facebook friends what articles you read on the site, sparking interesting discussions.

The problem: excessive sharing. The tools don’t share articles with your Facebook friends only when you click a “like” button, they share everything you read on the site. Your Facebook friends likely will feel buried under a flood of shared articles, and you might be embarrassed by what the social reader tells your friends about your reading habits.

What to do: If you’ve signed up for a social reader app, delete it. In Facebook privacy settings, choose “Apps you use,” click “Edit Settings,” locate the social reader app, then click the “X” and follow the directions to delete.

5.  Photo and video tags let others see you in unflattering and unprofessional situations. If you work for a straight-laced employer, work with conservative clients or are in the job market, you may already realize that it’s unwise to post pictures of yourself in unprofessional and possibly embarrassing situations.

But you may fail to consider that pictures other people post of you can also hurt you.

A Facebook feature called photo tags has dramatically increased this risk. The tags make it easy for Facebook users to identify by name the people in photos they post—Facebook even helps make the IDs—then link these photos to the Facebook pages of all Facebook users pictured.

What to do: Untag yourself from unflattering photos by using the “remove” option on these posts. Arrange to review all future photos you’re tagged in before they appear on your Facebook Timeline by selecting “Timeline and Tagging” in Facebook’s Privacy Settings menu, clicking “Edit settings,” then enabling “Review posts friends tag you in before they appear on your timeline”. Better yet, ask your friends and family not to post pictures of you without your permission. Be sure to extend the same courtesy to them by asking whether or not they mind you tagging them in a photo.

6.  Our Facebook friends—and those friends’ friends—offer clues to our own interests and activities. Even if you’re careful not to provide sensitive information about yourself on Facebook, those details could be exposed by the company you keep.

Example: A 2009 MIT study found it was possible to determine with great accuracy whether a man was gay based on factors including the percentage of his Facebook friends who were openly gay—even if this man did not disclose his sexual orientation himself.

Sexual orientation isn’t the only potential privacy issue. If several of your Facebook friends list a potentially risky or unhealthy activity, such as motorcycling, cigar smoking or bar hopping among their interests—or include posts or pictures of themselves pursuing this interest—an insurer, college admissions officer, employer or potential employer might conclude that you likely enjoy this pursuit yourself.

What to do: Take a close look at the interests and activities mentioned by your Facebook friends on their pages. If more than a few of them discuss a dangerous hobby, glory in unprofessional behavior, or are open about matters of sexual orientation or political or religious belief that you consider private, it might be wise to either remove most or all of these people from your friends list, or at least make your friends list private. Click the “Friends” unit under the cover photo on your Facebook page, click “Edit,” then select “Only Me” from the drop-down menu.

Most of all, remember that Facebook and other social networking sites are social by nature, which means that they are designed to share information with others. The responsibility to protect your personal and private information doesn’t just fall on the social networks; it is also up to you.  Following these Facebook privacy tips can help you succeed in keeping your most personal information safe. 

John Sileo is an an award-winning author and keynote speaker on identity theft, internet privacy, fraud training & technology defense. John specializes in making security entertaining, so that it works. John is CEO of The Sileo Group, whose clients include the Pentagon, Visa, Homeland Security & Pfizer. John’s body of work includes appearances on 60 Minutes, Rachael Ray, Anderson Cooper & Fox Business. Contact him directly on 800.258.8076.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgwQPhpRPd0&rel=0]

Delete Your Facebook After Cambridge Analytica?

I’ve written A LOT about Facebook in the past.

  • What not to post
  • What not to like
  • What not to click on
  • How to keep your kids safe
  • How to keep your data protected
  • How to delete your account

ETC! Search specific topics here.

And personally, I’m ashamed of myself for knowing exactly how social networks like Facebook take advantage of users and our data, and yet still have a Facebook profile. I’m not just sharing my information, Facebook is also sharing everyone of my “friends’” Information through me. I’m currently thinking that the only way to protest this gross misuse is data is to delete my profile (which still won’t purge my historical data, but will stop future leakage).

And yes, I’ve written several times about how Facebook is allowed to sell your privacy.  Now, it turns out the practices I have warned about for years are taking over our headlines with a “little” news bit about how Cambridge Analytica has used data obtained from Facebook to affect the 2016 U.S. Presidential election.

Here’s a brief timeline:

  • In 2014, a Soviet-born researcher and professor, Aleksandr Kogan, developed a “personality quiz” for Facebook.
  • When a user took the quiz, it also granted the app access to scrape his or her profile AND the profiles of any Facebook friends. (Incidentally I was writing about why you shouldn’t take those quizzes right about the time all of this data was being gathered!  And, it was totally legal at that time!)
  • About 270,000 people took the quiz. Between these users and all of their friend connections, the app harvested the data of about 50 million people.
  • This data was then used by Cambridge Analytica to help them target key demographics while working with the Trump campaign during the 2016 presidential election.
  • Facebook learned of this in late 2015 and asked everyone in possession of the data to destroy it. (They did not, however, tell those affected that their data had been harvested.)
  • The company said it did, and Facebook apparently left it at that.

That takes us up to recent days, when The Guardian and The New York Times wrote articles claiming that the firm still has copies of the data and used it to influence the election.

What’s happening now?

  • Facebook has suspended Cambridge Analytica from its platform, banning the company from buying ads or running its Facebook pages.
  • The Justice Department’s special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, has demanded the emails of Cambridge Analytica employees who worked for the Trump team as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the election.
  • The European Union wants data protection authorities to investigate both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. The UK’s information commissioner is seeking a warrant to access Cambridge Analytica’s servers.

And what should you be doing?

Consider deleting your profile. I am. I’ve written about how to do that before and how to weigh deactivating your account versus deleting it. Consider carefully before making that choice.

Remember that the real illusion about Facebook is that there is anything significant we can actually do to protect our privacy. Facebook provides an effective privacy checkup tool, but it does nothing to limit the data that Facebook sees, or that Facebook decides to share with organizations willing to buy it, or even that hackers decide to target.

The data you’ve already shared on Facebook, from your profile to your posts and pictures is already lost. There is nothing you can do to protect it now. The only data you can protect is your future data that you choose to not share on Facebook.  Here are my suggestions for a few pro-active steps you can take right now:

  • Delete or deactivate your Facebook profile
  • Reread my post about Facebook Privacy from 2013—unfortunately, all of it still applies today!
  • Memorize this phrase: “Anything I put on Facebook is public, permanent and exploitable.”
  • Tell some little white lies on your profile.
  • And stop taking those quizzes!

John Sileo is an an award-winning author and keynote speaker on cybersecurity, identity theft and online privacy. He specializes in making security entertaining, so that it works. John is CEO of The Sileo Group, whose clients include the Pentagon, Visa, Homeland Security & Pfizer. John’s body of work includes appearances on 60 Minutes, Rachael Ray, Anderson Cooper & Fox Business. Contact him directly on 800.258.8076.

Facebook Privacy Settings Get Needed Update

Facebook Privacy Settings… Some may say it’s too little, too late. I’m relieved that Facebook is finally responding to concerns about their confusing and weak privacy settings.  The social media giant (who has been losing customers of late) has recently made several changes to their settings.

Facebook Privacy Settings Update

  1. Additional photo settings.  Your current profile photo and cover photos have traditionally been public by default. Soon, Facebook will let you change the privacy setting of your old cover photos.
  1. More visible mobile sharing settings.  When you use your mobile phone to post, it is somewhat difficult to find who your audience is because the audience selector has been hidden behind an icon and this could lead to unintended sharing.  In this Facebook privacy settings update, they will move the audience selector to the top of the update status box in a new “To:” field similar to what you see when you compose an email so you’ll be able to see more easily with whom you are sharing.
  1. Default settings for new users.  Instead of automatically defaulting to “public”, new users will now have their default set to “friends”.  They will also be alerted to choose an audience when they post for the first time. This is a significant step in the right direction of a business best practice called Privacy by Default.
  1. Privacy checkup tool.   Users may encounter a “privacy dinosaur” (pictured above) that pops up to lead them through a privacy checkup.  (At this time, it is not a consistent feature: Facebook is “experimenting” with it.) The privacy checkup tool will cover a number of settings, including who they’re posting to, which apps they use, and the privacy of their profile information.
  1. Public posting reminder .  The privacy dinosaur will also remind you when you’re about to post publicly to prevent you from sharing an update with more people than you intended.
  1. Anonymous login.   This feature allows you to log into apps so you don’t have to remember usernames and passwords, but it doesn’t share personal information from Facebook. Traditionally, people using Facebook Login would need to allow the website or app to access certain information in their profiles. I’m also happy to see Facebook moving in this direction, as universal logins are one of the easiest backdoors for cyber criminals to exploit.

Facebook has been criticized for having unreasonably complicated privacy settings, had to pay a $20 million settlement for giving away users’ personal information, and frankly never seemed to care very much about personal privacy.

I’m guessing that Facebook has learned a valuable lesson: that by giving their customers the privacy controls they desire, they are creating happier, more loyal users, which is a long-term strategy for success. The need for change hasn’t disappeared, but these Facebook privacy settings are a step forward.

John Sileo is an an award-winning author and keynote speaker on identity theft, social media privacy, fraud training & technology defense. John specializes in making security entertaining, so that it works. John is CEO of The Sileo Group, whose clients include the Pentagon, Visa, Homeland Security & Pfizer. John’s body of work includes appearances on 60 Minutes, Rachael RayAnderson Cooper & Fox Business. Contact him directly on 800.258.8076.

7 Security Secrets of Social Networking

On the surface, social networking is like a worldwide cocktail party—full of new friends, fascinating places and tasty apps. Resisting the urge to drink from the endless fountain of information is nearly impossible because everyone else is doing it—connecting is often advantageous for professional reasons, it’s trendy and, unchecked, it can be dangerous.

Beneath the surface of the social networking cocktail party lives a painful data-exposure hangover for the average business. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are now the preferred tool for malware delivery, phishing, and “friends-in-distress” scams while more business oriented sites, like LinkedIn, allow for easy corporate espionage and the manipulation of your employees.

To avoid the cocktail party altogether is both impractical and naïve—the benefits of social networking outweigh the dangers—but applying discretion and wisdom to your social strategy makes for smart business. Follow these 7 Security Secrets of Social Networking to begin locking down your sensitive data.

  1. On social networks, possession is ten-tenths of the law.When you put your business’s information on a social network, you have forfeited your exclusive right to that information. Unlike a physical asset, information can be simultaneously recreated, stored and accessed by unlimited users at any one time, allowing it to flow like water through your fingers. Additionally, there are very few laws governing the ownership of information once it leaves your office (e.g., goes into the cloud), leaving you no legal precedence for winning back your privacy. On a personal level, for example, when you populate your Facebook profile with a birthdate, it is sold to advertisers along with your demographics, “Likes” and a map of your friend network. Similarly, in the business world, the minute you establish a Facebook page and begin to attract “fans” or a Twitter page for followers, you’ve just centralized and publicized your customer list for competitors. Solution: Create a strategic plan before you expose your intellectual property. Prior to going live with a corporate social networking profile or sharing your next post, think through how much sensitive information you are sharing, and with whom. Unlike a traditional website, social networks connect human beings, some of whom want to map your organizational structure, track your marketing initiatives, hire your star employees, breach your systems, poach your fan list or steal sensitive intellectual capital. It is imperative that you: 1. Create a strategic social networking plan that 2. Defines what information can and should be shared by executives and employees on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. 3. Consider using social media to attract new prospects rather than creating a following of existing (and poachable) clients. 4. Populate your profile with only publicly available, marketing-based data. 5. Keep personal comments for personal pages, as they have no place at work. 6. Don’t rely on a policy to communicate your intentions and requirements surrounding social media. The most successful companies build a culture of privacy through an interactive process that allows the entire team to co-create a solution.
  2. Lack of education, not technology, is the greatest source of risk. It’s easy to blame our data privacy woes on technology. At the heart of every security failure (technological or otherwise), is a poor human decision, generally due to a lack of awareness. For instance, an employee, not a machine, decides to spend their lunch break using their work computer to post on personal social networking sites. In many cases, they do so because the business has not established guidelines for these scenarios, nor have they educated them on the risks. For example, most employees don’t understand that more than 30% of all malware is delivered to corporate computers via social spam through personalsocial networking use conducted on work computers. Solution: Educate your team as individuals first, employees second. The most effective way to change a human being is to appeal to them emotionally, not intellectually. Most of us are more emotionally connected to our personal lives than to our jobs. Consequently, by motivating your employees to protect their own social networking profiles first (and their kids’), you are not only lowering the malware and fraud that they introduce into your computers through lunchtime surfing, you are also giving them the framework and language to protect the company’s social networking efforts. Be sure to: 1. Break the training down into bite-sized, single topic morsels that won’t overwhelm or discourage employees. 2. Allow employees to spend a few moments applying the fixes you’ve just given them. 3. Once they’ve made the changes personally, reconvene and discuss what it all has to do with your organization’s social networking strategy. They will return to the learning table with emotional buy-in and awareness. Strategies Three and Five (below) are examples of this bite-sized, personal to professional adaptation process.
  3. Most social networking risks are old scams with new twists.During a lunch break at work, you receive a Facebook post that seems like it’s from a friend. It’s impossible not to click, enticing you with captions like, “check out what our old high school friend does for a living now!” Seemingly harmless, you click on a video, a coupon, or a link to win a FREE iPad and presto, you’ve just infected your computer with malware that allows cyber thieves full access into your company network. You’ve been tricked by a repackaged version of the virus-delivering-spam-emails of five years ago. Spam has officially moved into the world of social media (thus, social spam), and is now responsible for 30% of all viruses, spyware and botnets that infect our computers. Solution: Discuss social spam self defense at your next team meeting. It’s amazing how quickly people detect social spam once they’ve been warned! After all, they’ve seen it all before disguised in other forms. In addition to giving employees visual examples of social spam, click-jacking and like-jacking, make sure that they are equipped with the following knowledge: 1. If an offer in a social networking post is too enticing, too good to be true, too bad to be real or just doesn’t feel right, don’t click! 2. If you do click and aren’t taken directly to the site you expected, make sure you never click a second time, as this gives cyber thieves the ability to download malware onto your system. 3. Deny social media account takeover by using strong alphanumeric passwords that are different for every site and that you change frequently. 4. Account takeover is easy for criminals, which means that not all “friends” are who they say they are. If you suspect foul play, call your contact and verify their post. 5. Make sure that you protect your business with the latest cyber security and anti-theft prevention tools available. I will discuss these in the next strategy.
  4. Cyber thieves follow the path of least resistance by looking for open doors. Data thieves aren’t interested in delivering malware to just anybusiness (using social networking as their primary delivery device); they specifically target organizations that have done the least to protect their computers, networks, mobile devices, Wi-Fi and Internet connection. Why burgle a house with deadbolts and an alarm when you can attack the home down the street that left the front door wide open? In business, the “open door” usually comes in the form of poor computer security. Solution: Create a Path of Strategically Elevated Resistance. Thieves get discouraged (and move on to other victims) when you put roadblocks in their way. Keeping your network security up-to-date is the smartest way to quickly and effectively elevate your defenses against cybercrime. Follow these simple steps: 1. Hire a professional to conduct a security assessment on your network; the investment will pay for itself hundreds of times over. During the assessment and follow-up process, make sure that the IT professional: 2. Installs a security suite like McAfee on every computer, including mobile devices that travel, 3. Sets up your operating system and critical software for automatic security updates, 4. Enables and configures a firewall to block incoming cyber criminals, and 5. Configures your Wi-Fi network with WPA2+ encryption. To cover all of your bases, make sure that 6. You are prepared for a breach if it does happen. Deluxe, in partnership with EZShield, provides state-of-the-art identity protection and recovery services for businesses. It’s like health insurance for your information assets.
  5. Data criminals systematically exploit our defaults. Another way to create a path of strategically elevated resistance is to take away the “broadcast” nature of social networking exploited by thieves and competitors. Instead of inviting everyone to your cocktail party, only allow people you know and trust. When users set up a new social networking profile, the tendency is to accept the “default” account settings. For example, when you establish a Facebook account, by default, your name, birthdate, photo, hometown, friend list and every post you makeare available to more than one billion people. Solution: Change your defaults! It only takes minutes to modify every Privacy and Security setting offered by a social network. On a personal level, 1. Consider limiting who can view your hometown, friend list, family, religious affiliation and interests to Friends Only or even Only Me and 2. Disallow Google to index and share your profile on its search engine. Businesses will want to 3. Leave the indexing feature On to maximize search engine traffic. 4. Post updates to categories of friends (friend groups), not to the entire world. This isn’t only safer personally, it also makes for more targeted and appreciated customer service. 5. Make sure to update your defaults regularly, as social networking sites tend to make frequent changes. Many businesses with Facebook Fan Pages, for example, have not updated their profile in accordance with Timeline, meaning that their page is outdated and unprofessional.
  6. Social engineers mine social networks to build trust and exert influence. The greatest social networking threat inside of your organization isn’t malware or information scraping. Your greatest risk comes from a data spy’s ability to get to know youand your co-workers through your online footprint. Social engineering is the art of manipulating data out of you using emotional triggers such as similarity, likeability, fear of offending, authority, etc. A social engineer’s greatest tool of deception is to gain your trust, which is easy once they know your likes, friends and updates that you publish daily. After a month or so of cultivating what appears to be a legitimate relationship, social engineers begin to manipulate you for information. Solution: Verify, then trust. In the information economy, where data is quite literally currency, you must verify someone’s intentions and credibility before you begin to trust them. Here’s how: 1. Don’t befriend strangers; your ego wins, but you lose. 2. Before you accept a second-hand friend, verify that your existing network actually knows and trusts that person. Too many users accept friends indiscriminately, so you need to investigate their credibility before you hit the Accept button. 3. Don’t believe everything you read on social networking sites. In fact, don’t believe anything of substance until you verify it with reputable, primary sources like a national newspaper, ethical blogger or noted expert. 4. Never send money to a friend in need, download an entertaining app or give away sensitive information via social networking unless you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the request is legitimate and that your communication is private and secure.
  7. In social networking, there are no secrets. The title of this paper was intentional – people want exclusive access to knowledge that others don’t have. We all want to know the secret, and I used that human desire in a gentle form of social engineering to get you to read the article. But in social networking, there are no secrets. The instant you hit the post button, your information becomes public, permanent and exploitable. It’s public because you have little control over how it is forwarded, accessed by others or subpoenaed by law enforcement. In the blink of an eye, your information is backed up, re-tweeted and shared with strangers. Digital DNA has no half-life; it never disappears. And as you’ve seen above, it can be used against you. Solution: Don’t just read, act! Reading is not enough; you must act on what you have read: 1. Revisit the information you over-share on your social networking profiles and remove it. 2. Modify your account privacy and security defaults so that you share only with the people you trust. 3. Educate your team from a personal perspective first and then apply it to your organization’s needs. 4. Strategically elevate your defenses by securing your computer network with software like McAfee, and recovery services like EZShield. 5. Research advanced fraud and social engineering tactics to protect yourself and your company.

Every company I’ve consulted to that has experienced a data breach wishes that they could “go back in time”. Why? Because recovery is often 10-100 times more expensive than prevention, and because data breach causes customer flight, bad press and depreciated value. Companies that prepare for the coming onslaught of social networking fraud will escape relatively unaffected. Businesses that are unprepared will suffer extensively. According to the Ponemon Institute, the average cost to a business of any size that experiences a data breach is $7.2 million, which explains why so many small businesses go bankrupt after a data loss event, as they are unable to pay the recovery costs. That gives you 7.2 million reasons pay attention.

John Sileo is an award-winning author and international speaker on the dark art of deception (identity theft, 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. His clients include the Department of Defense, Pfizer, the FDIC, and Homeland Security. Sample his Keynote Presentation or watch him on Anderson Cooper, 60 Minutes or Fox Business. 1.800.258.8076.

College Identity Theft Speaker

I’ve got a neighbor who’s going back to college this week and reminds me that this is by far the highest risk group for identify theft and it’s for a couple of reasons.  When these kids are going off to college, it’s the first time they are getting true financial independence, which might never have been trained to handle.  They have access to credit cards, to new bank accounts, and they’re managing it themselves.  That’s a huge red flag that there’s going to be trouble.  Number two, they’re going into an environment where their stuff is not particularly protected.  They’re in a dorm room, they’ve got roommates that may need extra cash; they know they can take advantage of them.  So it’s kind of a high risk environment.  The third reason is because they do so much online.  There’s so much social media interaction and that’s where ton of information is stolen. So you need to take some of these steps that are in this blog post.  Help your students take them.  It will help them out not just this year in college but helping them build their financial future going forward.  Your identity is pretty much everything in terms of your net worth. You got to take care of it now.

John speaks professionally about social media privacy and identity theft to college students.

Facebook Can Use Your Photos in Their Ads Without Permission

Did you know that Facebook can use photos you post on the site in advertisements targeted on the right (advertising) side of your contact’s profile?

Unless you customize your privacy settings, Facebook can share just about anything you post with just about everyone. Using your intellectual property for their financial gain is not a new Facebook issue, but one that should be revisited due to recent Facebook Privacy changes. Here’s the funny part: you gave Facebook the right to use any of your content in any way they see fit when you signed up for your account and didn’t read the user agreement. If you visit the Facebook Statement of Rights page you will see the following:

You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

  1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
  2. When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
  3. When you use an application, your content and information is shared with the application.  We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information.  (To learn more about Platform, read our Privacy Policy and Platform Page.)
  4. When you publish content or information using the “everyone” setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).
  5. We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them).

Make sure you customize your privacy settings so that you are sharing your data at a level comfortable to you. One place you may not realize you need to check is Facebook Ads. When you visit your Account Settings page the last tab on the right is Facebook Ads. By clicking on it you can adjust your settings  — after you read their pop up on not selling your information. Where is says “Allow ads on platform pages to show my information to” and “Show my social actions in Facebook Ads to” Check No One. This gives you just a bit more control over what Facebook can share about you and your profile.

As it states above,  information you delete from your Facebook may not be permanently deleted. Just know that once something hits the internet it is there for good. Posts, pictures, videos and comments on social networking site are public, permanent and exploitable.