Social Media Account Take Over

August 30, 2017
Social Media Monitoring

Social Media use nowadays is commonplace, along with its popular use comes a great risk of identity theft and other abuse and fraud. Maintaining secure social networks is challenging  due to the diversity of communities and the ability to create accounts and identities with minimal verification and authenitication.

Social Media Account Take OverCurrently social media platforms are still booming, and a lot of people are patronizing it like buying hotcakes from a breakfast stand, and that is how I compare the flow of information throughout the social media world right now.

Now the question is would you believe in everything that you see on the internet? The digital cyber era is considered to be in its early stages, and as time passes by a lot of changes and reforms happen, both positive and negative. Despite the changes a lot of people are still victimized and fall prey to cyber-attacks and fraud.

Specifically account take overs via hacking and cracking altogether is becoming quite popular(again) in this era, this time most of it is done remotely and the victims are celebrities and corporations! One of the least expected victims are corporations and security firms themselves, why because both of them work together to secure their information as a means of taking care of their respective businesses.

Let’s take the following for example:

Sony Playstation’s Social Media accounts were hacked recently by a group called Ourmine. These group were at least known to have started last year, and then they were known for hacking celebrities’ accounts and corporations as well.

Currently their demands have something to do about asking Sony to seek help from them to aid them patch and secure their security loopholes. They don’t want to share any leaked or confidential information from the public, this could be a subtle case of ransom attack or probably they are seeking for an employment to be part of Sony’s Security team if you will ask me.

Surprisingly it is HBO again, if you could remember recently their database has been hacked. Shortly after their database has been hacked, here comes their social media account in Twitter hacked none other by Ourmine, they also hacked the main HBO and Game of Thrones account.

In good faith, the hackers did not release any sensitive information, however they blatantly told the social media world that the accounts were hacked and the security of the account has failed. In any case, the damage could have been worst if these hackers released some information or defamed the accounts in any other ways possible.

Remember to keep it a daily habit to secure your social media accounts, refrain saving passwords using your browsers. Practice changing the passwords frequently, let us say about every 30 to 90 days. Account take overs can be quite messy. There is a possibility that the information can be downloaded from the compromised accounts and then use it to for replication to create fraudulent social media accounts, which is why monitoring social media account duplicates is a vital security measure to keep one’s business in check.

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