Learn about social media cyberthreats

While social media can help businesses to increase brand awareness and engagement with the public, it also puts users at risk of opening insecure pathways.

Security strategist at FortiGuard Labs Jonas Walker warns community members about five social media-related cyber threats to protect against. These include:

• Social engineering refers to a wide range of attacks that leverage human interaction and emotions to manipulate a target. Such attacks attempt to fool victims into giving away sensitive information or compromising corporate security.
• In a phishing attack, usually via an email or online message, cybercriminals bait potential victims by enticing them to click a malicious link or open a malicious attachment or enter sensitive information into an online form.
• Malware, such as viruses, Trojans, spyware and ransomware are used by cybercriminals to access devices and networks and steal data and take control of systems.
• Brand impersonation is when an individual or group tries to impersonate a well-respected company or brand to trick victims into providing confidential and valuable information that can be used by social engineers to hack systems and networks.
• Catfishing is when a person takes information or images from another to create a fake identity to victimise an individual on a social media platform.

Walker offers the following measures to protect the public from becoming victims to these security threats:

• Enable multi-factor authentication, providing two or more authentication factors to access an application, account or virtual private network.
• Use a different password on every account to prevent accounts from being easily hacked.
• Regularly update security settings across platforms and set them at the most stringent level.
• Be discriminating about the types of people you connect with on social media.

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