My Yahoo Mail account got hacked last night, which made me do some serious thinking about security and especially how it relates to social media.

I was able to quickly change my password (which hadn’t been a very good one-bad me), and all is well now. But this experience reminded me of an article I read a while back about how social media sites can be used to hack other accounts.

Apparently, one of the easiest ways to hack an account is to figure out a username and then use the “lost password” function to get the password. When you lose your password, you use that feature, and you are usually asked your security questions.

And this is where social media comes in. The security questions are often things like “What’s your favorite movie?” or “Who was your first grade teacher?” Go to your Facebook or MySpace page right now. Look at your profile information. I bet it has the answers to many of your security questions.

And that type of information is often not the stuff you lock away from privacy settings. Most of us don’t think too much about revealing our favorite movies or TV shows. I have information like that on my page. Although my true favorite movie is not on my Facebook page. I removed it after I used it as a security question. Nor is the color of my first car or my dad’s middle name.

As with all security, there is a fine line between revealing everything and locking down your life completely. I didn’t write this post to scare you. Just to make you think for a minute before you reveal something in your social media profiles.

Hey, I just added some new favorite TV shows to my profile. They aren’t ones I’ve used as security questions, so no harm to it. Well, unless you think liking Buffy the Vampire Slayer makes me a bad person. If so, don’t friend me on Facebook.

Tags: social media

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 9:20 am and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.