Social Networking
Social Networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are becoming more and more popular.
With popularity, brings increased risk of attack, as the 'Bad Guys' tend to gravitate towards the largest targets.
There are a number of known Facebook and Twitter scams, so please stay up to date by checking in with our Latest News page.
First Things:
Don't use the same password for Facebook as you do for online banking.
Don't include your full date of birth in your profile. By all means put your birth day, but not the year. This information can be used to crack a forgotten password or other ways of pretending to be you.
Turn on your privacy settings so that only friends can read about you. By all means allow yourself to be searched so that old friends can find you, but do close off all personal info, status updates, friends lists, pictures, and wall posts to all but friends. Be wary of joining 'networks' and setting suitable privacy settings for those.
First Things:
Don't use the same password for Twitter as you do for online banking.
Don't post your GPS position if you're at home. Be aware that if you do, and then tweet that you're going away for 2 weeks, you become vulnerable to burglary.
Be VERY careful about clicking links. We say don't ever click a link from a person you don't know.
After that, be extremely careful about clicking links from friends (as often their account has been compromised and they have no idea they are sending bad things out).
Ultimately, the best security is to not click any links at all, but we try to give a balanced, reasonable and useful view. If you click a link, just be aware that it could be problematic
Finally, keep abreast of the current Twitter scams doing the rounds. Follow us on Twitter, as we will always tweet about the latest scams (SimpleNetSecure)
Next Steps:
The majority of social networking vulnerabilities occur by making the user click a link in a tweet or Facebook posting that takes the user to a malicious site.
Be very wary and suspicious of any links sent to you, especially if the grammar is slightly odd.
Be even more careful with links that have been shortened, and therefore obscured.
URL shortening services that are often used like bit.ly, will mask the real destination, which could be malicious (not to be bad but because that's how their service works).
We recommend using Sucuri which shows the real location of a shortened url. It's a bit inconvenient to copy and paste a shortened URL into another web page before you visit it, but much much more inconvenient if you fall victim to a Trojan or other malware.
Here's a good page with some great details for setting Privacy in Facebook. We suggest you really lock down all your private information.
Also, change your passwords to Facebook and Twitter once every few months, or immediately if you notice any odd behaviour, such as friends asking why you sent them a strange message.
Take the time, or pay the price.
As ever, exercise common sense and a reasonable amount of suspicion.
Finally, please follow us on Twitter for up to the minute simple security tweets!
