Should I hide my face behind the book?

Facebook and I

I am in trouble. I hate its security
My wife knows the name of my girlfriend

The above title of my blog may be funny, but what if it was true? My sweet wife would have made me sleep till eternity six feet under by now. Our sensitive information, whether that be the intellectual property, financial figures, personal information, or other types of data any unauthorized access or exposure could have very negative consequences. Multimedia and its hosting organizations transmit this sensitive data across networks for storage, data manipulation, report generation and for other purposes in the course of doing businesses. As the volume of information and sensitivity increases, the safeguarding of such data becomes a nightmare for these organizations.

Unfortunately, social media has failed miserably in protecting its users’ data. If we look back at some of the recent cybersecurity news headlines, it’s clear to see that it’s been a year full of ransomware and cover-ups. We all enjoy keeping up with friends and family on social media, but we have to be mindful of our privacy and security when we access our pages. Cyber-attacks are becoming more sophisticated and much harder to detect and block. Whom should we blame? Our current model of internet security is too vulnerable to the mistakes of individual programmers and IT professionals. A small mistake likened to misspelling “Mississippi”, and all but invisible in 400,000-odd lines of code – had allowed the world’s hackers into the servers of Google, Amazon, Facebook, Tumblr and more, exposing sensitive personal data including credit card numbers and passwords (Leader, 2018).

Today, Facebook dominates the industry by boasting an account of 85% of internet users worldwide (excluding China). Even though out of 2.32 billion users, Facebook has only 65 million business users, but this still is a significant number. CBS news, on its April 4, 2019, new bulletin reported that 146 GB of Facebook user data, including account names, IDs and details about comments and reactions to posts. That interprets to 540 million records about Facebook users were publicly exposed to Amazon's cloud computing service. In another report published in September 2018, an attack on its computer network had exposed the personal information of nearly 50 million users. Due to its security cracks, Facebook is under federal criminal investigation for deals it struck with electronics manufacturers to access user data. In another report, the British analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, which worked with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, got access to data from more than 87 million users.
These security breaches are exhorting the limits and it looks that a general user has to be more vigilant of its professional persona on Facebook. One of the reasons for this security problem was that hundreds of millions of Facebook users had their account passwords stored in plain text and searchable by thousands of Facebook employees — in some cases going back to 2012, (KrebsOnSecurity, 2019). While I think that it is difficult to quit Facebook, we all must be taking security measures in order to protect our data as business professionals.

I would recommend taking the following measures:

•  Update your password more frequently.

• Use Two-Factor Authentication.

• Make sure to log out everywhere.

• Keep a keen eye on unrecognized Login alerts.

• Disable access to applications/websites

• Check roles and permissions for pages, groups, apps, ad accounts, and business accounts, and report any unauthorized changes or people who are not recognized.

• Examine payment settings to ensure that there have been no unauthorized changes to payment details.

• Review active ad campaigns in Ads Manager to ensure that there were no unauthorized changes to ads, bids or budgets.

• Examine Marketplace accounts to ensure that there are no listings that were not created by the account holder. 

Mark Zuckerberg famously said that “we have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you.” (Zuckerberg, 2018). Maybe, just this once, he was right.

I do not have a professional account on Facebook and use LinkedIn for my professional socializing. But still, I could take at least the first six measures to keep my personal account safe.

References:

I changed my password to nothing. . me.me/i/i-changed-all-my-passwords-to-incorrect-so-whenever-i-21442590.