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With so many of us being stuck at home while social-distancing as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, some people are looking for more indoor or online activities to keep themselves occupied.
As a result, online social media quizzes are being posted at a much higher rate than usual. While it might be fun to share your favorite colors, your high school mascot and how many times you have been divorced with your friends and family, quizzes like these can also provide potentially sensitive data to hackers and other “internet bad guys.”
Questions on these quizzes are often similar, if not identical, to the security questions that places like financial institutions or even your employer might use to help you reset your lost or forgotten passwords. They can also be used in spear- phishing attacks, which are highly targeted email phishing, against you.
For example, if you respond to a social media quiz in which you identify the high school you attended and the year that you graduated, it would be pretty easy to send you an email pretending to be from the school’s “20 year reunion committee” and ask whether you are interested in joining the committee. The email might encourage you to click on a link to sign up, but in reality the link is a malicious one which leads to malware that infects your computer.
Instead of answering social media quizzes and posting your results, why not find some time to call or video- chat with friends or family and ask each other the questions yourself? You could get some much-needed human contact and learn some things about the people in your life without making yourself vulnerable to fraud.
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Jordan Silva is senior manager of service delivery at Hawaiian Telcom. Reach him at jordan.silva@hawaiiantel.com.
