Two years ago Sophos conducted an experiment amongst UK Facebook
users. It created a fictional character and asked 100 people to
befriend it; 43 did. It has just conducted the same experiment in
Australia and found that social networking users have not learned
to be more careful.
The survey found that 46% of users in a fictional 21 year old's
age group accepted the offered friendship, while 41% of a fictional
56 year old's peers did.
On Facebook once someone has been accepted as your 'friend' they
can see more information about you, but you can still choose to
hide information from those friends or limit it to specific groups
amongst your online friends.
Sophos found that once the fictional characters had been
accepted as friends they had access to huge amounts of data that is
exactly what scammers need in order to impersonate someone.
"Both groups were very liberal with their email addresses and
with their birthdays," said Sophos head of technology in Asia
Pacific Paul Ducklin. "This is worrying because these details make
an excellent starting point for scammers and social engineers."
"Nearly half of the youngsters, and nearly one-third of the
50-somethings, also offered up details about friends and family –
again, information which scammers and identity fraudsters can
exploit to build up an accurate and abusable profile of you and
your lifestyle," he said.
Scammers can use all sorts of information to access a victim's
bank accounts, company records or gain credit in their name. Email
addresses are often user-names for services, and many people use
their birthdays as the basis of passwords.
Information about a person, such as their marital status, family
arrangements and even pets' names, can be useful in pretending to
be a person and 'socially engineering' access to their goods or
records.
"Ten years ago, getting access to this sort of detail would
probably have taken a con-artist or an identify thief several
weeks, and have required the on-the-spot services of a private
investigator," said Ducklin. "Sadly, these days, many social
networkers are handing over their life story on a plate."
Sophos published guidelines to follow to prevent important
information falling into the wrong hands.
"Don't blindly accept friends," it said. "Treat a friend as the
dictionary does, namely 'someone whom you know, like and trust.' A
friend is not merely a button you click on. You don't need, and
can't realistically claim to have, 932 true friends.
"Learn the privacy system of any social networking site you
join. Use restrictive settings by default. You can open up to true
friends later. Don't give away too much too soon.
"Assume that everything you reveal on a social networking site
will be visible on the internet for ever. Once it has been
searched, and indexed, and cached, it may later turn up on-line no
matter what steps you take to delete it."
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