Next time you post details about your workplace and job description on social media websites, be careful you could emerge as the potential target of hackers and cyber criminals. Cybercrime experts and forensic consultants say that hackers scour through social media database of employees of organisations they intend to attack and send phishing mails to them.
A recent report by EY on Cybercrime Incidents in India highlighted how social media was emerging as one of the biggest risk zones from the perspective of cyber attacks, with 90% of the 160 top executives responding to the survey identifying it as a major source of cyber attacks.
“Employees post extensive details regarding their work profile on social networking websites. These social media platforms act as goldmines for cyber criminals to identify and target key individuals for a successful breach,” said the report.
Highlighting the fact that excessive usage of social media by employees could increase the risk of a cyber attack the report said that employees with low awareness of risks from social media could become weak links in the organisation and vulnerable to hacks.
“It is common for individuals to have their personal information, job profile available and accessible on social media platforms, making the hacker’s job only easier,” said the report.
In a recent interaction with ET, Aleks Gostev, the chief security expert at Kaspersky Labs, which provides cyber security solutions to business entities had said how in the case of the Bangladesh central bank heist it was reportedly an employee who had put ‘swift operator’ in his job description on a social media website, thereby making him an easy target.
“Such disclosure of information makes employees vulnerable to external attacks,” he said.
At a sectoral level financial services along with technology, media and telecommunication sectors were the most affected by cyber attacks with 24% and 26% of the targeted attacks happening in these sectors
Further with the increased pace of digitisation of payments and technology at financial institutions the threat of cyber attacks have grown manifold times, said the EY report.
Ransomware demands through cryptocurrency like Bitcoins, vulnerabilities on mobile phones and even loopholes in the digital payments space are the emerging potential spaces for cyber attacks in India.
Source: ET tech
