The Relationship between Social Media and Cyber Threats

It is quite evident now that social media has become an essential part of our lives. Be it communicating with our friends, choosing a restaurant, finding jobs, or simply kill your precious time while bored; social media is quite deep-rooted. This also makes these socially draped algorithms a perfect ground for Cyberattacks.

With all this information on Social media, it has become the right platform for hackers. They can easily find employees on platforms like LinkedIn and involve them in phishing scams like impersonating someone.

Some of the recent social media threats -

Social media threats are not limited to social engineering attacks. Here are a few instances when hackers leveraged social media for their malicious intent.

• A North Korean state-sponsored threat actor was discovered creating fake Twitter profiles and blogs on existing vulnerabilities to build fake personas as security researchers. Using these fake yet convincing accounts, the group attempted to contact the targeted security researchers via Twitter, LinkedIn, and Telegram.
• Another North Korean threat actor, Zinc, was found targeting security researchers by building its reputation on Twitter.
• Just recently, scammers were impersonating real HR employees and sending fake job offers to job seekers on LinkedIn in an attempt to lure them into giving up their financial credentials.

How to save yourself and not become a victim?

Well running away from such platforms doesn't look to be the right way. However, such attacks can be minimized by organizations providing cybersecurity training to employees. Cyber Security is one of the major/hot subjects when it comes to career growth. One should always remember that while individually the posts seem harmless enough, collectively, they are a treasure trove of information just waiting to be exploited.