Secure Your Digital Shadow

For today’s generation, social media is the ultimate equalizer. Smartphones and social media have expanded our world and, in turn, made the world a smaller place. This large-scale connectivity has however put us at great risk of cyber-crimes. According to a recent report by an international cyber security company, a large number of people are becoming easy targets for hackers or cyber criminals.

Kaspersky Lab highlighted the importance of “rules of safe online behaviour” in its statement, following a study of more than 18,000 users from 16 nations. The report also stated, “the failure to identify a potential Internet threat may head to results that are as obnoxious as in the real world, an interference with privacy, loss of money.”

Kaspersky lab’s research shows that social media habits of today’s generation make it easy prey for cyber criminals. The lab issued various suggestions that can help secure the social media accounts of Facebook users.

• Verify your Facebook contacts.
• Try to verify the identity of your facebook friends.
• Do not share your banking and business credentials on Facebook.
• Be wary of unknown people.
• Don’t accept friend requests from people that you don’t know.
• Passwords are created for a purpose, keep them secure. Do not Share.
• Keep updating your password very often using different characters.
• Don't click on all the links received from your friends, as only 24 percent of users could tell the difference between original websites and fake ones as per the study results.

According to the report, 61 percent of people kept only name and profile pictures for public view, whereas 18 percent of people chose the option of keeping all the pictures and post for public view. There were some <4-8%> who chose to keep every detail open for public view.

“Social networking sites are where we leave information about ourselves — our digital shadow. Once they have cracked a user’s page, cyber criminals get the chance to publish advertisements on his behalf, send malicious links to his friends, or use his personal information for their own purposes,” the Kaspersky report said.

The study also reported that when people receive a friend request on facebook, 57 percent of people accept only the request of those whom they know personally. 31 percent check the mutual friends and 12 percent accept every friend request to increase their number of friends on social media.

Another important and a potentially threatening finding from the report was regarding downloading an attachment from an email even if it was an executable file (.exe format) which is most likely a malicious file sent by a potential hacker. As per the report, nearly 34 percent users engage in such activity.