Monday, April 20, 2020

7 Espionage Tricks to Avoid While Working From Home

Don't get tricked into giving away personal information. 
Why? Because this is what you use for your passwords.
  1. Facebook Quizzes
    Quizzes are all over Facebook:  What does your eye color say about you? What kind of dog are you according to your zodiac sign? (Facebook says these were questions the criminals used.)

  2. 10 Things About You
    As people try to connect during the stay-at-home order, they are answering cut-and-paste questionnaires from their friends. They usually start with something like “Tell me 10 things I don’t know about you” and go on to ask questions like: Who was your first love? ... Here's the problem: those are the exact same questions asked when you forget your password. So, be wary of posting the answers on social media.

  3. Posting Information about Your Passwords
    People are posting all sorts of information about what’s going on at their homes with their children or with their pets. That’s fine, unless they use those same names as their passwords.

  4. Photos of the Home Work Station
    At this point, people are pretty proud of their work from home stations. They have a new webcam, a makeshift desk, and maybe even a good microphone. But posting photos of that home work station might give criminals too much information. Can someone see the screen from a window? Are they giving away the brands and models of their IoT devices (which might or might not have exploitable vulnerabilities)?

  5. Clicking Questionable Links
    There are a lot of questionable links on the internet. Users should be wary of sites they don’t recognize. While this is rudimentary advice, it’s a good reminder that the headline “New Pandemic Cure No One Is Talking About” likely leads to a malicious site.

  6. Be Aware of What’s Public
    Savvy users have changed their Facebook and Instagram profile settings to make them more private. But as soon as you post to a group or comment on someone’s post without strong privacy settings, folks outside your friend's group can see what you’re doing. And, other sites like Twitter and Reddit are not generally private. more 
 Thanks to Jake Milstein, CI Security Inc. for compiling this list.