Social media isn’t just for promoting your brand, selecting the coolest hashtags, or getting into political arguments that go nowhere. Social media is also a cyber risk for your company. Social media has turned into a playground for cyber-criminals. At least one in eight major corporations will have security breaches due to social media hackers in the coming new year.
The easiest way for this to occur is when someone in your company neglects their privacy settings or publicly posts personal notes or photos. This gives the hackers easy access to use the information to launch targeted phishing emails containing malware links. You may see faux-Facebook updates posted by third parties, which contain malware offering free merchandise to anyone participating in a particular survey. Attackers have also used Facebook Messenger to spread malware, promote phishing applications, and snatch vital info by using social engineering techniques.
Facebook isn’t the only cyber-war zone. Twitter has also been the subject of these type of scams. The same can be said for the work-related social media haven, LinkedIN. In recent months, they have suffered redirects to a site that installs a form of the Zbot malware, which is known as Zeus.
Anything you post online these days is fair game to crooks. Your organization needs to know the best ways to protect itself. In an era of file sharing on steroids, you must face this reality head on. Organizations should embrace security-aware culture and not shrug it off as a choir. Make sure each and everyone of your employees understands the potential risks involved in using social media on work desktops, laptops, or mobile devices. There are easy steps that employees can take. The most obvious one being, limiting what outsiders are able to find out about them. In this current world of showing off online, a CEO might be better off having employees who shy away from the social media spotlight. They need to refuse friend requests from people they don’t know and never click on suspicious links.
Social media has radically transformed how people receive and send information, for better or worse. It has created a form of communication unlike anything Alexander Graham Bell or Samuel Morse could have ever thought of in their most vivid dreams. But now this power comes with several serious security risks for businesses, as stated above. The bottom line is DON’T BE AN OVER-SHARER, especially in the workplace. Providing hackers with information that assists them easily in breaching your company’s data is like handing the contents of your wallet over to a stranger.
