What You Need to Know

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Take a moment and ask yourself: When was the last time you changed your password? Do you still use the same password as when you were 12 because it’s the only one you probably remember? No, I’m not talking about me.

In all seriousness, social media is such an important part of how we communicate and interact online, and we all need to approach it with more caution. In this article, we explore the different ways to keep your social media accounts safe and secure. And to make sure we’re providing the most accurate advice for managing social media security, we’ve sought insight from Rafael Broshi, CEO of Notch, a social media insurance company.

When it comes to social media security, there are several types of threats that you should be aware of. Raphael says the most common scams aren’t done by hackers like Matrix in a dark room, but are usually run through a concept called “social engineering.” It breaks down the potential threats into three scams:

Security Risk 1: Emails impersonating social media platforms

The first scam, and the most common, are emails impersonating a social platform, be it Instagram, YouTube or TikTok. Here’s how this scam works:

Scammers get a large email list from valuable accounts, usually targeting accounts with at least a few thousand followers, because they understand that it could be a source of income for people, or it would just bring a lot of value because it took a long time of time grow up.

Then they send those people a generic email that says something like, “In one of your recent posts, we saw a violation of our terms of service. If you don’t fill out the following forms, you’ll be suspended for next 24 hours.”

For your part, you may receive an email from a domain that appears to have been sent from Instagram, and since the platforms use different domains to send emails, you can’t always tell if an email has been sent from real instagram just by looking at the sender. One email can be for security alerts, while another is for sending the latest offer from the platform.

A user might think that they will never fall victim to this, but a scam that is being sent to a thousand different emails will land in people’s inboxes in different situations. Maybe a hundred of those people are having a stressful day and so aren’t that vigilant, or fifty people just posted on Instagram a few seconds ago and suddenly get a terms of service violation email. Depending on the nature of the scam, it may look legitimate enough for some people to click on it.

Raphael adds that when you click on a link in a phishing email, it will send you to a website that looks exactly like the social platform with a slightly different domain (like “.net: or “tik-tok. com”).However, once you enter your username and password, you’re done.

Now, you might be wondering where two-factor authentication comes in, which is highly recommended for social media security. Well, the scammers will copy the details you enter on the fake website to the legitimate one in real time. So, if you get an email asking for your two-factor authentication code, it will think nothing of it and give you the code by putting it on the fake website.

It seems quite complicated to set up, but so simple in real time that it can happen in a few minutes.

What can you do to prevent this from happening? Look for communication from social media platforms from apps when you’re already signed in.

Using Instagram as an example, you can go into your app → go to Settings → click on “Security” → click on “Instagram Emails”. There you will see all the official communication of the platform.





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