November was an interesting month at Bubble Towers! I’ll spare you the full details, since that would be classed not as a blog, but as a novel!
Stalker Alert!
We’ve known we have a stalker for some time (Dear stalker – I’m sure you’re reading this – you know who you are and you are being monitored – very, very closely), which suggests to me that we’re clearly doing something right, since it’s a competitor! However, in November, things took a more sinister turn when someone seemingly impersonated us on social media. I use the word “impersonator”, since this is the term Twitter used when I reported it to them.
Impersonator Alert!
Don’t get me wrong, national secrets were not divulged; data was not misplaced, leaked or otherwise made public; in fact, the experience was quite enlightening in many ways (unfortunately very time consuming in implementing the necessary changes too!) In a nutshell, a client of ours received an email purporting to be from Twitter. That email invited him to join Twitter and connect with Steve, yet when he clicked on the link within the email, it fed through to someone else and not Steve. Don’t ask me how this happened – I can’t be certain (yet) that it was a deliberate attempt by someone to maliciously divert our clients to them, nevertheless that’s what happened. The thing is, it was a competitor, which makes the situation seem more than a little fishy to me, shall we say!
Now flattery aside, we took the necessary and appropriate steps – we changed all the passwords and “broke some links”, shall we say, plus we obviously reported the incident to the relevant authorities for further investigation. Fingers crossed, that should hopefully bring about an end to these activities and, if found to be malicious, allow for further recourse as appropriate – we shall see!
Take Your Social Media Security Seriously
So, the moral of the story is stay alert – make it as difficult as possible for others to act in this manner. Make your passwords as strong as possible. Include asterisks, punctuation marks etc where possible and use numbers for letters (i.e. 7 / T or 8 / B etc) as these all add to the password strength. Change passwords regularly and don’t make them too obvious to guess. Log out of every inactive session (don’t just go back, back, back or click X at top right) and don’t stay logged into an app / site if it’s not being used.
OK, so some of these actions are a pain in the 4r5e (see what I did!), nevertheless, trust me from someone who knows, if you are impersonated (or worse still, hacked / bugged / virally infected etc), the pain will be significantly more and will possibly come with a price tag to rectify. We were very lucky to find out (and a HUGE thank you to the person who informed us) as it wasn’t obvious to us, so please, if you note something weird happening when trying to connect with / talk to a friend or colleague, let them know.
Safe Tweeting / Facebooking / Google Plus-ing / LinkedIn-ing etc peeps.
AND since this will be the last blog this year, may I take this opportunity, on behalf of all of us here at Data Bubble, to wish you all a Very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year!
