In a world powered by digital devices, where social media enables us to share widely and rapidly, our personal information is more vulnerable than ever. As we spend more time online, and with malicious activity now commonplace, it’s crucial to take the time to understand how to protect our information.
When security solutions aren’t enough
With threats continually on the rise, there’s a good reason why cybersecurity solutions that protect digital identities have skyrocketed in recent years, but even these solutions can’t stand in the place of simple and necessary best practices to protect you and your information.
Adequately safeguarding your online identity may feel daunting but it doesn’t have to be. Combining a healthy dose of common sense with tips and tricks acquired over years in the industry has led us to understand the important building blocks of a strong foundation of security. This foundation requires us to get back to the basics, implementing best practices and behaviours, and leveraging security solutions when necessary.
Recognising the need for real world, practical advice and steps to take to safeguard your online identity, our Intelligence Analysts have published a whitepaper on this very topic, drawing on their expertise to share pivotal insights into operational security and privacy in the age of social media.
The whitepaper covers several common vulnerabilities and sources of exposure, with tangible, practical recommendations to minimise the vulnerability of your online presence, so you can enjoy the benefits of social media without the fallout.
Breaking it down to get to the core vulnerability
In the whitepaper, we lay out how to develop good habits that improve your identity security and limit the ability to assess and exploit personal information. We cover what may seem obvious and that which you may never have considered before, and share resources and insights to help you on your journey to a safer online presence.
For instance, have you ever considered the potential vulnerability of your usernames and profile URLs? Utilising the same username, or variants, across multiple platforms enables a threat actor to identify your online profiles which they can leverage for an attack.
OSINT, which stands for open-source intelligence, is the means of gathering information with automatic or manual means, from public sources, including the deep and dark web and websites. While the practice itself is fully legal, leveraging only public information, this can then be used for more nefarious means. The OSINT community is known to use free script-based username enumeration tools to search across hundreds or thousands of websites for accounts or URLs featuring a specific username.
In order to address this issue, we offer various suggestions. For one, avoid using your full real name for online accounts wherever possible. You could decide on a pseudonym or simply use your first name. Another top tip is when a platform allows users to customise your profile URL, such as Facebook or LinkedIn, you can edit the default URL to include randomised characters, a pseudonym or a misspelt variant of your name.
Understanding and stopping the threat against your personal information
In our whitepaper we go much more in depth into how we can and should be protecting your online identity. Other key topics we cover include privacy settings, public profile details, data breaches and passwords, personal data aggregators, and the role of family and friends.
We’ve been doing this work long enough to see the unfortunate reality of how seemingly small vulnerabilities can lead to bigger issues. While it can still be unlikely for anything untoward to take place, it’s better to take the time to tighten up security best practices and improve your safety overall.
