In light of a thread recently I figured I'd mention the effects of your digital footprint and how important it is to keep your personal data to a minimum.
Your digital footprint could be a social media page, reddit account, accounts with online retailers, airbnb accounts or any account that has some sort of personal information. This information can be extremely easy to find depending on how available you make it. Especially if you're name is unique.
As a quick experiment, open an incognito window in chrome or equivalent in your respective web browser and try to google search your name. This makes it so your search results are not altered by your cache'd browser history or browser cookies. How much information about yourself can you find? Can you learn your DOB or location, maybe even enough information to get your home address? Occupation, or employer? What about what you did last Saturday? Email address? Names of family, friends or spouse? If you found something else I didn't list, mention it in the comments.
Now that you know what a digital footprint is, its important to understand why this information matters. As you've either successfully gathered, or done a good job concealing, all of the personal information above is important for verifying identification or a gateway to obtaining more data. The more data an individual has on somebody, the easier it becomes to access personal accounts and email. How many security questions do you have that asks what your pets name is? Mothers maiden name? Street you grew up on? Childhood best friend? This is all information that can easily be social engineered or just obtained by searching you on the internet. Now say they are able to reset your password to your email account. I'm not going to get into the specifics, but know that there is always a way to get access. Some loophole or hole in the providers security wall. It could be through other accounts with trivial security. Here are 2 examples of how such can happen. I HIGHLY recommend reading through both so you can understand the process of how these things can happen.
But I digress, if you didnt read these articles lets give you a scenario. Say a hacker gains access to your email. This is the email you use for your personal emails, amazon account (now the hacker has the last 4 of your credit card number which is sometimes used for verification), and lets say you had Turbo Tax email you a copy of your 2014 returns for safe keeping. Now the hacker has your Social Security number. Not to mention if you have a cloud storage account that contains personal data/pictures and whatever else. The list goes on.
So, now said hacker knows your name, email, social security, last 4 digits of your CC #, along with other bits of data. Whats to say this hacker doesn't use your data to open a new card? Or this person can sell your data to somebody who will. Now you're the victim of identity theft and posting on /r/PF on how to fix this.
Some companies recognize how important it is to keep even the smallest amount of data secure and offer additional levels of security like googles 2-step authentication. Take advantage of all of this! Please!
Or a completely different scenario, where you make too much information publicly available. Some current employers will take some of this information to make decisions on whether or not to hire a specific candidate. If your social networking profile is just pictures of you partying, getting drunk, smoking weed or doing other drugs, what does that say about who you are and your work ethic.
This short video briefly covers some of the topics I've covered in this post and some others. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ro_LlRg8rGg
ALSO to improve security, dont tie all of your accounts together with 1 email address and dont daisy chain your passwords and email accounts. This means dont use the same password for every account, and dont tie one email to another email to another email for recovery purposes Change the prefix for each account to make guessing it more difficult. For example, dont use asdf1234@gmail.com and asdf1234@yahoo.com and asdf1234@hotmail.com. Mix it up a little bit.
Anywho, I hope this brings to light everybody's digital footprint and helps bring awareness to how much information you put online.
Please feel free to comment or add to the topic as I just briefly grazed over the surface of how important this information can really be.
Submitted February 14, 2017 at 08:54AM by Maxwell_hau5_caffy http://ift.tt/2lM5zS1
