TLDR: Phishing is becoming more common, especially with the social media accounts of businesses. Follow these suggestions to help protect your privacy.
According to a Symantec report on cyber security in America, phishing attacks remain among the most typical types of attacks on both individuals and businesses and with the increased usage of social media this arena has been one of the main ways phishers target their victims. In fact, social media based phishing attacks increased a staggering 123 percent just last year, and those figures continue to grow because more people fall for them every day. Basic phishing attacks work by convincing unsuspecting users that they represent legitimate businesses and organizations in an attempt to gain sensitive information from those users. For example, many scammers might send out emails which look like copies of the emails you might receive from a popular site like Facebook or Twitter with an “alert” saying you have a new friend or a new message hopefully enticing you to click the link in the message. That link would then take the you to a site that again looks like a duplicate of the legitimate site with the Username and Password boxes in the same location so that users might instinctively enter their private information there. After those users enter their data the phishers now have all your access info and can wreak havoc on your account and possibly gain access to other accounts should you use the same password for all of them. Of course, on way to protect yourself and your employees from falling victim to these attacks is to check that the URL of the website matches where you expected to be taken to. However, even that isn’t foolproof because I have seen one site that had the URL Tvvitter.com with the two “v”s looking like a “w” to anyone just casually glancing at the URL. In the end, the best way to protect yourself is to regularly change your passwords, have different passwords for all your online accounts, update your computer regularly, and simply be cautious while on the internet and aware that people are trying to take advantage of you at all times.
