Vulnerability to cybercriminals

Social media by definition is pretty much public, and accessible to everyone.

Cybercrime can be perpetuated in two ways:

• Theft of content
• Hacking and illegal access/control of accounts

Content theft is rife: for example, this story – an artist who has been using Facebook to promote his work is now finding that the images are being lifted from his profile, along with images of himself and contact details, and used to fraudulently offer copies of his work for sale. The copies are of poor quality, and the result is that the original artist’s reputation suffers as a result. The user is responsible for notification of the breach to the social media company, and they then have a responsibility to remove the offending content.

The other primary method of attack is through the unauthorised access to these accounts. Sophisticated cybercrime gangs use an assortment of attacks (social engineering attacks like phishing) to trick users in to handing over their credentials to social media accounts. Once the credentials have been compromised, the cybercriminals are able to alter the content of that social media profile at will.