Social media is a fantastic marketing tool for many companies, especially small businesses. This tool helps you get your name in front of current and potential customers without spending much money.
Word of mouth marketing includes social media when consumers leave positive comments and reviews. Unfortunately, this is also a welcome mat for hackers. As a result, individuals and businesses must be more diligent in securing their social media accounts.
There are various kinds of attacks on social media, and they include:
- Identity attack
- This is where the impersonation of a user.
- Spam attack
- The attacker learns communication about the user and sends them spam or junk data.
- Malware attacks
- Sending injected scripts to users and when the URL is clicked leads the user to a fake website in an attempt to obtain personal information.
- Sybil attacks
- Fake profiles.
- Social phishing
- The attacker tries to obtain personal information via fake websites by honest or impersonating someone you are acquainted.
- Impersonation
- Create a fake profile, and this is easy to do for hackers with the photos and sharing of personal content on social media.
- Hijacking
- Gaining control of your profile.
- Fake requests
- The hacker sends a fake friend request in an attempt to enlarge their network, and they will gain more personal information from you when you accept the request.
Ways to protect yourself and the business
- When creating a business post, you can restrict who can comment on your posts.
- For example, what we are seeing is that when we post about an event, even a free one, scammers are instantly trying to comment on the posts that they have an extra ticket and to pm them for details. The scammers are creative, and they appeal to a person’s emotions by typically saying due to a family emergency, they cannot attend.
- Hackers are accessing business pages through the employee’s personal accounts.
- People share family, jobs, photos, and videos on social media. As humans, we share our lives to connect with others. Hackers watch this and learn a lot about the victim.
- Have strong passwords of 12 – 16 characters
- Use Private Wi-Fi
- Friend and follow verified and legitimate profiles.
- Limit the number of employees that have access to your social media profiles.
- Do not click on suspicious links.
Be careful. Accept friend requests from those who you know and have met. Be wary of accepting a friend request from someone already a friend. Be diligent in not clicking on suspicious links and trust your gut. If it feels odd or wrong, then it probably is.
Businesses and individuals can have a strong social media presence. However, we all need to be careful.