Learn about how common social media data breaches are, why hackers could steal your data and how to be protected.
A data breach is any access, leak or stealing of data without the permission of its owner, which is usually a business storing data insecurely.In addition to all types of platforms and business systems, social media platforms can also suffer data breaches, as they are always a grand prize for cybercriminals, with huge amounts of user and business data stored.
In this article, we are answering the most asked questions about social media data breaches: How common are they? What data can be leaked? How do hackers do it? And how to protect yourself?
How Common Are Social Media Data Breaches?
Social media data breaches are so common that any list of huge data breaches will definitely have social media platforms. This has been the case since social media platforms have begun to be part of our lives, and it is the case now, as Statista reports that 1.8 billion people were affected by data breaches in 2021, with over 800 million being affected in the first half of 2022.
Social media usually accounts for a large portion of data breaches, with the numbers of some of the biggest leaks in history confirming it. The ForgeRock Consumer Identity Breach Report estimates social media data breaches to account for 41% of all data breaches. Speaking of the scope of social media data breaches, there are many stories to tell. User records of 533 million Facebook users have been leaked according to a report in March 2021; the leaked data reportedly included full names, phone numbers, user locations, email addresses and biographical information.
This came just a few years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal that Facebook faced after the platform was accused of letting millions of user data leak to the federal analytics company, for using the user data to affect their 2016 presidential elections decision, as the data was reportedly used to manipulate them to elect Donald Trump.
What Social Media Data is Worth Breaching?
A lot of your data on social media is very useful that it can be sold after leaking. So, you never need to assume that getting access to your data is useless. These are some of the social media data cybercriminals are after:
- Contact and Personal Information: your contact information including your email address and phone number, alongside your personal information like where you live, your name, your age and other demographic data.
- Uploaded Private Media: you may have media uploaded to the servers of the social media platforms but set as private or shared with friends. Private media which is often photos or videos can be used for blackmailing and other malicious uses.
- Private Messages: most social media platforms have private messaging features. Getting access to your private messages can be a great way to access private photos and sensitive information.
- Usage Behavior and Activities: accessing any user behaviour from your social media account can let the cybercriminal know more than you expect about you, including your detailed interests and interactions.
- Passwords: passwords can let cybercriminals access your account to be able to view one or more of the data types mentioned above. By hacking your password, any data that you can currently view now can be accessed.
Data is usually used in marketing or malicious activities. Of course, your email and phone number, alongside your interest, are very valuable to marketers. All your data on the other hand is useful for malicious activities like blackmailing and other illegal actions.
The Threats on Your Social Media Accounts
Cybercriminals use a wide range of attacks to breach user data on social media. They range from attacks targeting a specific user to a group of users or millions of users by attacking the platform itself.
Vulnerability Attacks
There are many types of attacks that can target the social media platform itself to leak millions of user data by taking advantage of one vulnerability. This vulnerability can be one in the coding of the platform, which lets the cybercriminal perform an action that they shouldn’t perform.It can also be a bot attack like the DDoS attacks launched on servers to make them go down and take advantage of vulnerabilities during this offline duration. Other attacks also rely on server and database vulnerabilities that allow hackers to access user data maliciously.
Phishing Attacks
The highly common phishing attacks are targeted attacks involving cyber criminals tricking the victim into signing in to a fake page that they would think is the page of a social media platform they use. The fake pages are designed by cyber criminals to be typical of the original pages, but with codes to instantly send the data entered back to the criminal.This can be dangerous as it is used in leaking credit card information and not only passwords and personal data.
Social Engineering Attacks
Social engineering is used maliciously by cyber criminals to be able to predict or learn the password of a social media account of a specific user to access their data. Different tricks are used to achieve this goal.
Data Mining
Since data is the so-called gold of the future, data can be mined for profits. This can range from your public data being scraped by multiple bots, to social media platforms that you have shared data with selling your data to third parties that can both use or resell your data.
How to Protect Your Social Media Accounts from Data Breaches?
If you want to protect your social media data from being leaked online, sold to marketers or accessed maliciously by someone who wants to harm you, there are a few tips that you can use:
Pay Attention to Your Privacy Settings
You may be giving the chance to hackers, especially one who uses social engineering, to perform a successful attack on your social media accounts. This happens when you aren’t aware of any privacy settings and don’t even know what is publicly shared on your social media profiles.Additionally, if you haven’t checked your privacy settings on a social media platform for a long time, then you should be doing it. Platforms provide new settings and controls over time. Facebook, for example, now has more privacy tools than years back that you can use to protect your data. A basic tip is to make sure that information like your birthday, email, phone number and other details aren’t available publicly.
Avoid Phishing and Social Engineering
To avoid phishing and social engineering attacks, you need to be careful with the links you open online. When visiting a social media platform, make sure you visit the official app or open the link through Google or your browser directly.You never need to access a social media platform through a link sent through a chat or email. The same thing applies to PayPal or any other platform for payment, banking or anything else.You also need to avoid sharing information related to you with strangers, as this information can be used for social engineering tricks to manipulate you and steal your data.
Be Aware of Apps Connected to Your Social Media Platform
Some online platforms and applications that you use let you connect your Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat or Instagram accounts. You should be very careful when doing so, as the accessed data by this application (which can include personal and contact information) can be stored by the application or game, and then leaked from there. For the apps you have connected to before, any social media platform (including Facebook) will let you access the apps connected now in the settings, so you can also disconnect the apps you have connected at any time.
Don’t Use Public WiFi or Predictable Passwords
Public WiFi connections can allow a hacker, who may be targeting you by being in the same place, to perform an attack and steal your accounts. If you want the highest security standard, you should never be using public WiFi.Your social media account passwords should also be less predictable, to avoid anyone using social engineering to predict your password; using different passwords for every platform is also a best practice.
Use Two-Factor Authentication
Two-factor authentication is a feature that you will find in every social platform nowadays. It simply allows you to only access your account using an OTP sent to your email, phone or authenticator app. This can be useful as an extra layer of security for your social media accounts.
Close Accounts You Don’t Need
The more accounts you have on social media, the more you are subjected to data breaches. This is why you should delete any social media accounts that you don’t use anymore on platforms you are not interested in or alternative accounts that you don’t use now.
Final Thoughts
Social media breaches are very common, and your data on social media can be very useful to many parties. Hackers use a huge arsenal of tricks to get access to data, whether of one person or on a scope of millions. Luckily, there are many things that you can do to protect yourself from social media data breaches.
Contentech, your righthand translation services and multilingual content solutions partner do not only care for the quality of your provided services, but for the security of your business as well. Being a member of our family, we make sure to provide you with all the tips and tricks to secure your accounts, and accordingly your identity, in a world where data became the most valuable commodity.
Press Release Distributed by The Express Wire
To view the original version on The Express Wire visit Social Media Platforms and Data Breaches: Are Your Secured?
