More than half of all login attempts on social media platforms are identity theft attempts, a report from Arkose Labs shows. The cybersecurity firm analyzed more than 1.2 billion transactions across the financial services, e-commerce, travel, social media, gaming and entertainment sectors, highlighting key trends.
Among those trends is using bots to launch barrage attacks against millions of profiles: more than three-quarters of social media attacks were carried out by automated bots. Then, 25 percent of new profile creation requests are fraudulent. From the data of the “Q3 Fraud and Abuse report” by Arkose Labs, therefore, emerges an alarming picture and the certainty, rather than the suspicion, that hackers have now chosen social media as the first victims of their attacks. It also emerges that, compared to other sectors, the social sector is mainly attacked by bots and much less by human hackers. The goal, however, is always the same: to steal the personal data of legitimate social users.
Bad Bots Like Social
From account takeover attacks to attempts to create totally fake accounts for other frauds, social media platforms face a large number and variety of threats from bots as well as live cybercriminals. However, more than 75 percent of attacks on social are automated bot attacks. Unlike other industries, Arkose Labos explains, account theft attempts are the most common for social media: there are twice as many theft attempts as there are fake accounts being created. Scammers, then, try to collect personal data from the accounts of legitimate users and then, to a lesser extent, create fake accounts that are not linked to a real person.
How to defend against social identity theft
In light of this data, it’s clear that even our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or any other successful social profile could one day be targeted by bots and hackers. Defense strategies are both technical and behavioral. Setting up two-factor authentication and a strong password are the basic technical means of defending ourselves. Avoiding posting too much personal information on social media, on the other hand, is a useful way to prevent the worst should our profile be breached. Finally, limiting access to sites and apps through our social profiles to a minimum limits the possible gateways for hackers to access our valuable personal information.