Social Media meets Cybersecurity

Everyone always tells you to be careful what you post online and that once posted to the internet something will be there forever. Social media websites are the biggest examples of pages you should monitor your activity on and the information you give out on them. Whether it's someone being able to see private information you uploaded about yourself publicly, through your messages with friends, or clicking on a link from the website that turns out to be malware, it's safe to say there are numerous ways one can become less secure simply by just having an account on a social media website.

Twitter and Facebook accounts get hacked all the time and even prominent figures accounts (which could be argued are actually less safe than the average person's account) are vulnerable to cyberterrorists, hackers, and anyone trying to get a good laugh or access information they maybe shouldn't be able to see as easily. So is social media bad for cybersecurity? Not necessarily; social media websites take these hackings as a challenge and create algorithms and programs to detect any funny business so that hackers can't access information as easily as they used to. Hackers in turn develop better hacking software and it becomes an endless cycle where one party tries to outdo the other to ensure they get the final say in what happens to your data.

Avoiding social media all together seems like a good strategy then, right? On one hand, If you don't have an account, you can't get hacked, so your data and personal software are safe. However, it just takes one devious person to notice you don't have any social media accounts before it comes crashing down on you. By catfishing and pretending to be you, hackers are able to get access to private information they may not otherwise be able to get. Furthermore, if you can't monitor social media, pictures or information about you that you wouldn't want up otherwise can go unseen by you and thus uploaded, downloaded, and on the internet forever.

The best practice for social media is to monitor your accounts and limit both what you post and what information you provide. Limit who can see that information and what they can do with it, and to be really secure, make sure you use different passwords for each of your social media accounts, so if one is hacked, you have the others to fall back on.

Social media is still an evolving technology much like cybersecurity, and due to this it has led to many data leaks and hackings. However, because of it and the focus on keeping your information safe on social media, the world of cybersecurity has advanced greatly.