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Social Media: who would have thought about a decade ago thata host of websites and applications that allow social networking, will become a core part of our daily life?
Indeed, from running all sorts of promotional campaigns to familiarizing brand/products and from putting forward your thoughts on current affairs to finding your long-lost friends, social media’s reach and benefits are boundless.
Having said that; it also makes us extremely vulnerable in an ever-increasing digitized world, something which, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook learned it the hard way.
He fell victim not so long back to a hacking group, which breached his social-media accounts.
According to the hacker, “OurMine Team”, gaining access to Zuckerberg’s twitter and Pinterest accounts was possible because he used a same password for multiple social media accounts including the LinkedIn account, which suffered a massive data breach, earlier in May. More worryingly, the password used by him, ‘dadada’, was also very ordinary.
Data breaches of email accounts, social media accounts, retail stores, government organizations are now not unusual. Preventing breaches, however, is not difficult if companies identify andpatch vulnerabilities. Some companies do while some other just pass the buck on “state-sponsored hackers” or anything else which would help deflect public’s attention.
That’s why, amid increasing web-connectivity, the onus of securing our credentials and mitigating the potential damage, starts first with an individual. How one can do that? Well, that’s not a difficult task. To begin with, always keep a strong password, a string of both alphabetical and non-alphabetical characters, which is at least 8-character long. But more importantly, never use one password for multiple accounts and always rotate those.
In addition, using a two-factor authentication or a password vault could significantly cut risks of data breach. As people shift their files on cloud, it is not impossible for malefactors to breach data from service providers’ servers, which are easily accessible from public internet.
Likewise, be mindful of what you store and share online. Develop a habit of providing information on “need- to- know” and “need- to- do” basis and a culture of being risk-aware in this increasingly expanding cyberspace, where there are no boundaries.
ARCON is a leading enterprise risk control solutions provider, specializing in risk-predictive technologies. ARCON | User Behavior Analytics enables to monitor end-user activities in real time. ARCON | Privileged Access Management reinforces access control and mitigates data breach threats. ARCON | Secure Compliance Management is a vulnerability assessment tool.
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