What was your first car? Answer now and suffer the consequences!

What was your first car?

1.8k responses on the original post. 5.5k responses on the share?

Great.

Now I know what your first car was.

I also know, from your Facebook profile, what your full name is (thanks Facebook and your real name policy) where you live, (if you’ve entered it, which you probably have) who you work for and who your family members are. Some of you even have your phone number listed.

If you are female and married, I probably also know what you maiden name is if you’ve listed your mother as a family member (which you have). I also may know who your favourite bands are and where you were born. What school you went to, what university, what shops you like, what websites you go to.

Scared yet? No?

Have I covered all your security questions? It’s possible I have. I come across these very same questions in people’s accounts. We use them to verify your identity. If “What was my first car?” is a security question on the service accounts of any of these 7.3k people then that account is no longer secure. Anyone with Facebook access has those details now.

You should be scared. This how easy it is to get your info from Facebook posts.

This is often why such posts are shared. Maybe a friend shares it on Facebook. It’s just a bit of fun to them, but to someone else, the person they have shared it from perhaps, or the original poster way down the line…  it’s a way to scrape info from Facebook into a file that will contain the personal details of everyone who has replied. All 7.3k of them. And they can. Quite easily. They won’t do it themselves, personally. No. No-one is sitting personally trying to hack your details. You don’t matter that much to them.  No. They’ll do it with an automatic script. A bit of code. On a stolen computer server. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of accounts scraped per minute. Names, quiz responses, photos, any details made public.

It’s an impersonal rape. And it is a rape. Not sexual. They wont even be that intimate. Some may see it as something worse. They don’t care about you, but they’ll parse what they have against something they got from a Yahoo hack last year. See if it matches your name. Your details. See if it matches an email address in a hacked database.

Will it?

Where else have you had accounts? Has it been hacked? Many have. The algorithms exist. Google and Amazon use them to sell you stuff, criminals will use them to build a profile of you. See what they can get. They don’t care if it destroys your reputation. Your credit. Your identity. How much info do they have now?

http://www.wired.co.uk/article/biggest-hacks-of-2017-hacking-data-breach

Enough to steal your life?

Do me a favour?

Go change your passwords.

And your security questions.

Change them to something we won’t know.

What was your favourite childhood memory?

Who did you lose your virginity to?

What was your first kiss?

Have you posted these answers on-line?

Then chose something else. Keep it safe. Don’t post it in a comment on a pointless Facebook post because you are bored.

You have no idea how often people are searching for your details, and it’s impersonal. Automatic. Cold. Clinical. Computerised. Anonymous. Listen to your most paranoid thoughts. Multiply it by 4.

Make your security questions count. Things no-one else could know.

This is important.

Seriously. The internet is not the future, it’s the present. Protect yourself now. Or become a tired statistic.

 

Something to say?