145
votes
Accepted
Logged out of Facebook on all devices on a sudden. Should I be worried about being hacked?
Facebook reported a data leak today and forced a large number of accounts to log off as a precaution. Source: NY Times and Facebook.
That NYT article says "The company forced more than 90 million ...
- 6,898
70
votes
Accepted
Does this mean Target's twitter was successfully attacked?
Yes, Target did have their account hacked. In fact, quite a lot of verified account holders have been hacked to further this scam. The scammers do this to impersonate other accounts, including Elon ...
- 66.5k
31
votes
Does this mean Target's twitter was successfully attacked?
Target has since confirmed my suspicion:
Hard Fork article
“Early this morning, Target’s Twitter account was inappropriately accessed” a company spokesperson told Hard Fork in an email. “The access ...
- 1,839
30
votes
What are the real physical risks of casual social media publishing?
When looking for actual physical risks, doxing and the results are most important.
There are examples of the hivemind of Reddit and 4chan where peoples exact locations, addresses, names and anything ...
- 14.4k
15
votes
What are the real physical risks of casual social media publishing?
For example, I had experienced this in my practice:
When penetration testing one company, I got access to the system via a password recovery form, because the mail server provided options for ...
- 161
14
votes
Accepted
Help! My information has been stolen! What do I do now?
How secure are my auto-saved passwords in my browser?
Terribly insecure. These passwords are trivial to retrieve.
How secure are my passwords that have been saved in a password manager?
Not very ...
- 21.6k
13
votes
Logged out of Facebook on all devices on a sudden. Should I be worried about being hacked?
Are there any chances that someone was successfully able to get into my account? If yes, then how could they bypass the two-factor authentication?
If your account had 2fa, it seems unlikely that an ...
- 305
12
votes
Accepted
What are the real physical risks of casual social media publishing?
The "look at us on holiday" type of pictures are of interest because they can be viewed without arousing suspicion or notice, unlike keeping an eye on the house istelf. A single approach to a house ...
- 4,405
9
votes
What are the real physical risks of casual social media publishing?
One risk that isn't mentioned, but is very real for a lot of people, is identity theft. Identity theft is the act of someone using your identity, usually to do criminal things. Lots of people tend to ...
- 197
8
votes
Are hackers for hire a real thing?
Hackers for hire are real. Occasionally, they will even interview with established journalists if they feel they can maintain their anonymity.
That said, anyone approaching you over the internet is ...
- 3,942
6
votes
Why are data breaches like the one at Quora considered so bad?
Putting privacy concerns aside (as it sounds like you don't particularly care), having detailed personal information about you makes at least four things easier:
Identity theft, opening new accounts ...
- 4,007
6
votes
What are the real physical risks of casual social media publishing?
Few years ago there was a strong opposition to Gawker Stalker app for posting current locations of celebrities.
The main argument for the app was: By posting someone's location out on a public ...
- 3,266
6
votes
Accepted
How can someone hack Twitter accounts so fast?
First, don't assume that it was just one "hacker". Anonymous is a pretty large group, and they could have coordinated the activity. For all we know, the Anonymous user that tweeted about the hacked ...
- 3,602
5
votes
Are hackers for hire a real thing?
First, if the hackers for hire came to you offering services, they are more likely to be in the business of scamming than in the business of hacking.
Second, there are definitely individuals out ...
- 53
5
votes
Accepted
Is taking social networking details legitimate for a credit card?
Normal? No, not right now. But, we are going to see far more of this level of personal verification in the near future.
One of the difficult things for any company (or government) to do is to verify ...
- 128k
5
votes
Are hackers for hire a real thing?
Do they exist? Yes, it's often called red teaming, though there are both legal and illegal red teams. Legal red teams are pentesters who you pay to attack your company. You have a carefully written ...
- 66.5k
3
votes
Logged out of Facebook on all devices on a sudden. Should I be worried about being hacked?
This question is a great opportunity to point out that FB badly botched the handling of this. Being unexpectedly logged out and asked to login again looks just like phishing and it should be treated ...
3
votes
Site exposes user's GPS location through EXIF data
Is this actually considered a security risk, or are they right that this is just user error?
Is my approach of releasing a blog post and an application with it that can tell you if you are ...
- 9,432
3
votes
What are the real physical risks of casual social media publishing?
As this answer says, some personal information can be answers to security questions, possible allowing someone to access your email. I want to clarify the physical risks associated with that, since ...
- 190
3
votes
GPS metadata in uploaded pictures: vulnerability or not?
If a web application (like an internet forum, social media, etc.) does not remove GPS metadata (EXIF) from uploaded pictures, is it considered a security vulnerability or not?
It's not a ...
- 53.5k
3
votes
GPS metadata in uploaded pictures: vulnerability or not?
I think the concept you are looking for is "Hazard" not "Vulnerability".
Vulnerabilities are Hazards, but Hazards encompass far more than Vulnerabilities.
Let's take a look at this ...
- 128k
2
votes
Help! My information has been stolen! What do I do now?
The short answer is yes you should do all those things.
I never let passwords auto-save in the browser because it is pretty easy to yank them out.
For LastPass it would depend on what access the ...
- 31
2
votes
Can location/owner of mobile phone be identified
Well, that is hard to answer. He should not be identifiable by the GSM internet connection thanks to the VPN, but the native Facebook/Messenger app will almost certainly identify him by grabbing data ...
- 7,858
2
votes
If device is infected, can new devices get malware from associated social media accounts?
If you download the social media apps on the new phone from authoritative sources, I'm not sure how malware from another device could infect your new phone.
2FA would not help, because you would be ...
- 128k
2
votes
Is there a security risk in using the same profile picture on different sites?
I think anyone using Social media, or similar, is vulnerable the second they start to broadcast their life into the world.
In terms of a security risk, only really as far as you assisting the bad ...
- 337
2
votes
Why are data breaches like the one at Quora considered so bad?
Not familiar with Quora in particular, but here's some bad things that can happend in general:
You could suffer monetary loss, e.g. if credit card info was stolen.
Your online identity could be ...
- 65.4k
2
votes
Why are data breaches like the one at Quora considered so bad?
The "big deal" is that personal information that was knowingly shared with and entrusted to Quora by consenting individuals was compromised and obtained illegally by a third party. Obviously, the ...
- 137
2
votes
Accepted
How can I avoid getting exposed while travelling to Russia?
Now I am traveling to Russia and intend to use there the same laptop
I used to make my posts
I am going to write the answer assuming your laptop hasn't already been compromised with a rootkit/malware....
- 3,794
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible