Social Networking Security or Lack of When Promoting Your Brand: tips to protect your brand from malicious intent.

In recent years, the Internet and social media has become an extremely powerful tool for many small businesses. Many local businesses lack the capital that giant corporations have to put towards big budget television commercials, radio ads, and wide ranging ads on popular websites. In order to make themselves heard, many small businesses utilize social media websites like Facebook to broadcast their brand and their products to their prospective customers. Since these websites are often the only source of interaction between the two parties, it is of up most importance that the owner makes sure that her Facebook page, Twitter account, and any other social media service she has signed up for is as secure as she can possibly make it. If it is not secure, then it is only a matter of time before someone tries to break in and take control; and if they do manage to get in, they could start posting false information about your brand or use your account on that website to lure others into giving up their information, which not only harms your customers, it destroys any sort of trust the consumer has in your company.

There are a number of ways that someone with malicious intent could compromise your social media presence, some are out of your control, while others can be can be controlled by you. One very recent example of vulnerabilities beyond the user’s control occurred when a Palestinian hacker posted on Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook page, even though he was not a friend of Zuckerbergs¹. Luckily, this man was trying to be a Good Samaritan by making Facebook’s security team aware of this vulnerability, instead of using this for his own gain. This also shows an oft hidden fact about internet security in general: no matter how secure something is, eventually someone can and will find a chink in the armor.

While some aspects of securing your social media presence are out of your control, there are many simple steps that the user can take to minimize risk. This pdf² gives a lot of insight on how to protect your page, and by extension, your brand. While it is mainly a Facebook centric article, many of its tips can be applied to any other social media site. When it comes to a password, one should always use upper and lower case characters interspersed with special characters. These are much more difficult to guess. Every few months or so, that password should be changed. While surfing the internet, only visit websites you trust, because if you do not you run the risk of downloading some kind of malware that could compromise your account. And if you have Firefox and want to be very picky about what accesses your computer, install the NoScript addon³, which prevent any website you visit from running any JavaScript, Java, or Flash plugins on that website unless you want them to.

1.       http://rt.com/news/facebook-post-exploit-hacker-zuckerberg-621/

2.       https://usasma.bliss.army.mil/opsec/pdfs/GuidetoFacebookSecurity.pdf

3.       http://noscript.net/