Next time when you post a job description or some details about your company on social media, please think twice before doing it. Because nowadays, these social media posts are being targeted by hackers and cybercriminals.
United States Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) has issued a warning that hackers are scouring through the posts of employees of organizations they intend to cyber attack by sending them phishing emails.
A security audit conducted by FBI has confirmed that social media is emerging as one of the biggest risk zones for cyber attacks, with 90% of the 160 survey respondents, identifying it as a major cyber threat parameter.
Since, employees posts extensive details regarding their work profile on social networking websites, these platforms are acting as gold mines for cyber criminals to identify and target key individuals for a successful breach.
Therefore, FBI intends to highlight the fact that extensive use of social media by employees could put the company at the risk of being cyber attacked.
Aleks Gostev, the Chief Security Expert at Kaspersky Labs totally agreed with the alert provided by FBI and added an example to authenticate it. In early 2017, a major cyber heist took place in the Bangladesh Central Bank. After a probe was launched on it, it was discovered that an employee put his job description as “ Swift Operator” on social media which made the cyber crooks impersonate his profile, fake an email and send it to the central bank to carry forward a major financial transaction.
Hence, the above-said example can act as a perfect reference to FBI’s recent alert that disclosure of job details is making employees vulnerable to external hacks.
Note- SWIFT stands for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication and is an inter-bank messaging platform between banks meant for financial transactions like international remittances made by individuals, government agencies and corporate firms.
Want to share your mind on this issue…?
You can do it through the comments section below.
