I just read this article on CNN. I totally saw that one coming. The subject didn’t really hit me until my Online Security class that I took in the summer, when I did a research paper on Online Banking. A lot of banks use your personal information to identify you to grant you access to their online services. This includes asking you for your social security number, birthday, or something as trivial as your pet’s name. But with social networking, people are posting plenty of their personal data to the public, not aware that there are malicious people who probably gather that data in hopes of using it.
Social networking is a hot thing now, but it is still relatively new. Many users aren’t aware of the consequences of putting themselves out on the Internet. As for me, I kind of try to limit what I put out there, and thanks to some privacy measures recently executed by sites like Facebook, I can limit who can see what on my profile. Social networking sites are doing their best on their part, but the users are the ones who need to be consciously aware of their own actions.
My personal suggestions that users can take:
- Do NOT post any personal contact information.
- Remember, you post it on the Internet, EVERYONE can see it. So make full use of any privacy functions to control who is allowed to see your online profiles.
- If you are adding someone as your friend online, but do not know or recognize them, be a little bit cautious. Predators can still make up fake profiles to get to your information. So make sure you know who are your friends and try to make conversations with them to see if they are for real. Or you can use any privacy functions available to limit what they can see.
- If you are presented with setting up a personal Q & A for security for an online service (i.e. “What is your pet’s name?”), try to select a question that you know you will never post about. Or better yet, if you have the option, make up your own question that only you would know the answer to (which pretty much makes it like a second password)
- It should be obvious by now, but NEVER EVER choose a password that has any identifiable word that can be associated with you in it (i.e. a birthday, a name, a favorite hobby). Attackers have all the time in the world and they can still easily guess password by a brute force attack. But they can get access quicker by guessing a password that has the name of your pet fish in it.
There are also steps that banks and other online services can use in their authentication methods, but I cover those in my research paper.
