Covers how social media can expose personal data, spread scams, enable account takeover, and provide channels for influence or abuse.
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Background for this topic.
Social media comprises online services where people and organizations publish content, communicate, and form networks. The term covers public posts, private messages, groups, live streams, advertising systems, and the APIs and third-party applications that process platform data.
For security teams, these platforms expose identity, relationship, and behavioral information that can support targeted phishing, impersonation, or social engineering. Compromised accounts may be used to distribute malicious links or fraud, while excessive sharing and poorly controlled integrations can expose personal or corporate data. Relevant controls include strong authentication, phishing-resistant account recovery, least-privilege access for connected applications, monitoring for brand and executive impersonation, and clear retention and privacy policies. Public posts and platform telemetry can also provide threat intelligence, but collection and use may be constrained by privacy obligations and applicable data-protection rules.
Weekly headline count for the current query.
Former employee accuses company of prioritizing pending IPO over client security
Cash-for-intel tradecraft continues to concern intelligence officials years after it was first spotted
Parliamentary committee tells ministers online safety regime is failing children and warns 'no action is not an option'
After years of insisting end-to-end encryption was the future of online comms, Zuckcorp has handed itself full visibility into user chats once again
Social media biz says watchdog's fine formula is 'disproportionate' and should stop counting global revenue
Even limited voter rolls can be linked to identify people, research shows Your voter data could be used against you. A foreign intelligence service that wished to identify the family members of deployed military personnel could do so by cross-referencing public voter record data and social media posts.…
Legit-looking website, camera-on interviews, jokes about backdoors ... it worked EXCLUSIVE It all started with a LinkedIn message, as so many employment scams do these days.…
300 families undergo 6-week trial to test impact on sleep, school, and home life The UK government will trial different levels of restrictions on social media for under-16s with the help of 300 families, alongside a public consultation that has already gathered nearly 30,000 responses.…
Social media giant retorts it doesn't want to collect 'private' data, and plans to appeal The UK's data protection regulator has fined social media giant Reddit £14.47 million ($19.5 million) over its use of children's data.…
Social media platform’s legal eagles prepare to fight ever-growing number of countries The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) is the latest regulator to open an investigation into Elon Musk's X following repeated reports of harmful image generation by the platform's Grok AI chatbot.…
The more you share online, the more you open yourself to social engineering If you've seen the viral AI work pic trend where people are asking ChatGPT to "create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me" and sharing it to social, you might think it's harmless. You'd be wrong.…
Labour's latest U-turn? 61 backbenchers pile pressure for Starmer to back Tory peer's amendment The British government may impose a ban on under-16s using social media, despite Labour prime minister Keir Starmer having previously expressed skepticism over the measure.…
Cold milk poured over 'spicy mode,' but it might not be enough to escape a huge fine Ofcom is continuing with its investigation into X, despite the social media platform saying it will block Grok from digitally undressing people.…
Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch pitches age limits and classroom curbs as fixes for behavior and mental health The Tories have pledged to kick under-16s off social media, betting that banning teens from TikTok and Instagram will fix what they see as a growing crisis in kids' mental health and classroom behavior.…
PLUS: Veeam patches critical vuln; Crims bribing dark web insiders; UK school takedown; And more infosec in brief Meta has fixed a flaw in its Instagram service that allowed third parties to generate password reset emails, but denied the problem led to theft of users’ personal information.…
Proof of life? Or an active social media presence? Criminals are altering social media and other publicly available images of people to use as fake proof of life photos in "virtual kidnapping" and extortion scams, the FBI warned on Friday. …
MI5 sounds the alarm about attempts to source sensitive information Chinese spies are using social media and fake recruitment agents to recruit sources with access to sensitive information in the UK.…
Ready, aim, mire Loose lips sink ships, the classic line goes. Information proliferation in the internet age has government auditors reiterating that loose tweets can sink fleets, and they're concerned that the Defense Department isn't doing enough to stop sensitive info from getting out there. …
Civil recovery order targets PlugwalkJoe's illicit gains while he serves US sentence British prosecutors have secured a civil recovery order to seize crypto assets worth £4.11 million ($5.39 million) from Twitter hacker Joseph James O'Connor, clawing back the proceeds of a scam that used hijacked celebrity accounts to solicit digital currency and threaten high-profile individuals.…
Noyb says New York-based facial recognition biz flouted GDPR orders and kept scraping anyway Privacy advocates at Noyb filed a criminal complaint against Clearview AI for scraping social media users' faces without consent to train its AI algorithms.…