Even though we have many in our PCMech audience who are not that into Twitter, I continue to maintain that Twitter is a really big deal. I am a routine daily user of Twitter and will continue to be. [You can follow me at @davidrisley]
I also see the trends on Twitter, and one of them the last few days has been a stupid game where people would come up with their “porn name”. It works like this… take the name of your first pet and add the name of the street you grew up on or your mother’s maiden name. The resulting phrase would be your porno name.
Stupid mindless fun, right? A bunch of kids just having a laugh? Well, do those questions ring any bells? When you sign up for account somewhere (like your bank), remember how you have to enter a security question which you would use to prove who you are if you lose access to your own account? What kind of questions are typical? Your first pet. Your mother’s maiden name.
This stupid porno name game on Twitter is one huge racket of social engineering, getting people to willingly broadcast their answers to those important questions to all of their Twitter followers! And to add insult to injury, they’ve been adding the hashtag to it so that even people who don’t follow you can see your answers by simply running a Twitter search.
Social engineering is something you need to be aware of when you use social media sites.
My wife recently fell for one on the Russian version of Facebook. One of her “friends” emailed her and said that somebody was saying bad things about her. Naturally, she was curious. When she clicked the link, she found herself on a complete clone of the social media site, and it asked for her login. She entered it. My wife isn’t a computer person and her desire to know who said bad things overweighed her security concerns (which were essentially none). Luckily, I found out about it quickly and I told her to change her password immediately.
Social media is the “wild west” of the Internet still. Hidden behind a pretend veil of anonymity, people try all kinds of things and prey on the ill-informed.
So, don’t fall for it, guys. Don’t avoid social media sites because of this, because the benefits FAR outweigh the threats. Just, be careful.
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Thanks for the tip David. I will tell my nieces and nephews, who use facebook a lot, about this scam.
My sister got a call on her land line and they said they were from Microsoft and that her computer had a virus and to go to a website to pay for the fix. She then realized it was a scam and hung up.