Why I Hate Social Media

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I distrust social media. I have a Twitter and a LinkedIn account as required for the course and for this assignment which required two additional accounts, of which I choose Slack and Discord - but I hate social media. I value my privacy and have an almost irrational disdain for social media due to the expectation that users should expose details of their personal lives. Many people do not realize how much they are giving away to a stranger with each post, tweet, or status update; and do not realize that they are making themselves vulnerable to attack by a stranger, thief, or stalker. I feel the emphasis on the utility of social media drowns out the risks associated with sharing everything, or too much. I am a Computer Information Systems …show more content…

So, instead, I will explain how easy it is to hack into your accounts by using a lab exercise from my hacking class to demonstrate how I was able to hack into all of one guy's Google, ULM, and Facebook accounts in less than twenty minutes. It all began after we were assigned a person to try to hack. Now I will preface this by stating that I am more difficult to hack since I do not use social media, meaning finding personally identifiable information about me is not easy to come by. In other words, the more personal information you can find on your target, the easier they are to hack, and it is damn near impossible to find information about me. (I am not so secretive because I am up to no good, but because I know how easy it is to turn a tiny bit of information into control over another person's accounts.) Anyhow, I was assigned my person, so the first thing I did was ask one of my friends if I could use their Facebook account to scope the guy out. With Facebook's aid, I discovered his birthdate, his father's name and vocation, the city in which he lives, where he works, that he does not have any pets, and that he has a younger sister. Sounds innocuous, …show more content…

I had his Gmail username from my initial reconnaissance so now all I had to do was figure out how to get into his account without a password. I opened a new tab in my browser and accessed the Google login page and entered his username. Google offers double authentication which alerts users when someone tries to login by requiring a code that is text to your phone. If he had double authentication enabled, as I do, I would not have had time to access his account in the twenty-minute time frame we were given. I could have gotten around that, but it would have taken significantly more time. Anyhow, I entered his username and clicked the ‘Need Help?’ link as shown

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