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SCOOP SOCIAL MEDIA
Hacked
HOW TO DETER AND SURVIVE A SOCIAL MEDIA ATTACK
It was late, she was tired, yet Robin Baron (right) of Robin Baron
Design continued working. She noticed an email from Instagram
asking to verify her account. Easy enough, she thought.
The moment she clicked on it, she knew she was screwed.
She immediately reserved new Instagram handles, and never
once responded to emails asking her to pay money. Instagram
offered no real help. She stressed about it for a while and then
let it go, along with the hope of getting her account back. Weeks
later, she started a fresh feed with a new handle.
Codarus territory sales manager Tyler Lynch (left) says a hacker
accessed his Instagram app through his personal email, reset
all log ins and passwords, and locked him out. When the hacker
started posting on Lynch’s feed, asking followers for money,
Lynch told his friends to report his hacked account to Instagram
. But like Baron, nothing came from it.
In an unusual play, Lynch used Google to text the hacker – and
they answered! “They gave me great advice, ‘Don’t use the same
email address when resetting your details.’” They also said, “This
isn’t personal, this is business.”
Stephanie Benoit-Kurtz, lead faculty for the College of Information
Systems and Technology at University of Phoenix and
principal security consultant at Trace3, says there are exponential
threats in the technology environment and that small
businesses are soft targets. “Bad Actors [a name for cybercriminals
] are aggressively looking for business targets with information
, systems, and processes that can be accessed to create
some event that can be monetized,” she says, and the key is to
prevent it from happening.
While there is no such thing as 100% security, precautions like
having antivirus protection, paying attention to your email,
changing passwords regularly, and turning on two-factor authentication
, can help mitigate risk.
“Paying ransom only incentivizes Bad Actors to continue the
behavior,” Benoit-Kurtz says, “and just because you pay the ransom
doesn’t mean you’ll have your system back.”
Referring to the Federal Trade Commission’s suggestions for
restoring breached accounts, she says, “The idea is to gain control
of your account and identity without taking the last resort,
which is starting a new account. It is possible to regain control
of an account; it just might take some time.”
Another designer fought back unconventionally by hiring a Bad
Actor to hack her hacker. “It’s the Wild West out there,” she
says. Building her Instagram account over ten years to be a crucial
part of her business, there was no way she was going to
let anyone take it or make her pay for what was hers. Smarter
about security today, she calls the experience a painful lesson.
For Baron, it was more of a life lesson. “I calmed myself down
after the first few days and put it in perspective” she says admitting
her time off from social media was liberating. It’s important
to know who you are, what you do and your value independent
of social media – this can happen at any moment,” she says.
Lynch remains hopeful for the day he gets access to a decade
of memories again. –J.D.
16 | DESIGNERS TODAY
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