Picture this: You’re sitting at home, watching your favorite Janet Yellen video clips on YouTube. You’ve got your big bowl of organic popcorn, a glass of free-range grapefruit soda and your cozy gluten-free slippers. Janet’s just begun her testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, and you can barely contain your excitement…
Suddenly, the phone rings. CallerID reports the number as “000-000-0000 – Unavailable”, but you’ve already paused the video so you answer anyway. Your disinterested “Hello?” is met with a couple of seconds of silence, a muffled, mechanical click-beep, and a somewhat obviously prerecorded voice…
“Hello sir/madam. What is the name of the street your maternal grandmother grew up on?”
Chances are, you’re not going to answer that question, right? RIGHT?!?!
Yet, seemingly every minute, people are putting the answers to questions like this (and many others) out there for the world to see on social media networks, via those cute little surveys shared amongst “friends”, under the guise of “getting to know one another a little better”. Everything from your first pet’s eye color to your uncle’s favorite song involving a mandolin. Thirty questions designed to bring you closer to your friends…and make it incredibly easy to hijack your financial security.
Debit card thieves are putting Facebook to work as soon as they get their hands on your card. The less-savvy ones are looking for birth dates and anniversaries for PIN codes for the easy ATM or purchase grabs. The scary ones are building life inventories for larger windfalls, such as home/auto loans and other credit accounts, or opening deposit accounts in your name to be used as a placeholder for even larger scale fraud. And you’re handing it to them on a silver platter. Your favorite book. Your first car. Your high school English teacher. Many of the questions on those surveys are ripped straight from the security question database that many websites (including our own online banking) use to identify you. Some are word-for-word, others are more subtle and buried amongst 20 other seemingly harmless questions.
Even if you keep close tabs on who you “Friend”, and are sure to set privacy settings on your posts to only be visible to those “Friends”…how confident are you that those “Friends” are doing the same? If someone compromises an account on your Friend list, how much can they find out about you?
– Mark Swan, IT Manager/Network Administrator
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