Hackers invade social media space

Over the past few months, hundreds of South Africa's approximately 6.19 million registered Facebook users have become the victims of cloning. This practice, which is also known as deep mining, is when cybercriminals lift a user's name and profile picture from their existing account to create a duplicate Facebook profile from which they then send messages to the victim's friends asking them for money.

Easy to hack

"This is a popular scam since it is low-tech and easy. Hackers obtain your password illegally when you click on external links, apps or games or they copy and paste all your public information. Alternatively, depending on your privacy settings, they can send you a friend request. Once you accept, they start copying all your information and pictures to create an exact replica of your profile," explains Lutz Blaeser, MD of Intact Security, a South African distributor of several security software solutions, including Avira anti-virus products.

Blaeser says the purpose of this is to steal money. "It is reminiscent of that e-mail scam that went around a few years ago, but instead of using e-mail, the Facebook fraudsters now use the social networking site to send out private messages to the people on your friends' list claiming that you are in some sort of trouble and need them to send you money. Those good Samaritans, who fall for the story, end up paying the money straight into the scammer's account."

He warns that it can also lead to identity theft and spam being sent from your account. Such hacks and cloning are more than just an annoyance to the victims. In some instances, it can cause major embarrassment and destroy personal and professional reputations too.

Moreover, it is not only Facebook users who should be on the lookout, hackers are wreaking major havoc on other social media platforms as well.

Loss of reputation also critical

In April 2013, the Associated Press (AP) news agency fell victim to hackers who sent out a breaking news tweet to the agency's almost two million followers claiming that there had been two explosions in the White House and that US President Barack Obama had been injured. The damage was far-reaching. Within minutes, the untruth had been retweeted thousands of times, the stock markets dropped by $136 billion in value and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell almost 150 points before AP confirmed that the tweet had been the handiwork of hackers.

"Although AP is not the only high profile corporate Twitter account that has been hacked, it experienced more damage than some of the other victims. Firstly, its credibility and reputation were harmed - even though the false tweet was not the handiwork of an AP staffer. Secondly, Twitter suspended its account for around 24 hours to prevent the hackers from posting again. Although understandable, the closure caused the news agency to lose many of its followers and many potential clicks to its website, since it normally uses Twitter to link to its news articles."

He advises that the time from when a breach occurs on any social media account to when it is discovered and caught, is crucial to minimising the damage. "Knowing when one's account has been hacked isn't as obvious as one might think, especially not in the instance of a corporate account, where more than one person might be posting to the feed. Therefore, it is not just a matter of seeing content that was not posted by one person. One would first have to check with everyone who has permission to update the feed if they had posted the update."

Warning signs

Other signs that one has been hacked have been listed by the Avira blog and include noticing that someone has logged in from a different location. "Most social media services have this feature built-in nowadays. If one normally logs in from South Africa and someone tries to gain access to one's social media platform from, say, China, one might be asked to verify the account owner."

Other warning signs would be if an app starts posting on one's behalf, when one can't login to one's account anymore or one suddenly starts befriending and following a lot of new people one doesn't know.

He says that there are steps that social media users can take to protect their accounts from being hacked into. "Enable two-step authentication wherever possible, never use the same password for different accounts and install and use good antivirus software on all devices from which one accesses one's social media accounts," he concludes.