Cyber Chat Episode 7 – The dangers of social media

Welcome to episode 7 of Cyber Chat, in this episode Rob May discusses the dangers of social media and how people are tricked daily into giving out personal information about themselves using a form of social engineering.

Managing the ongoing cybersecurity of your IT infrastructure should be a primary concern – whatever the shape or size of your organisation. Cybersecurity breaches are the number one threat in today’s business landscape. Incidents come in many forms: cyber attacks; laptops left on trains; malicious staff; or, even more simply, accidental data loss caused by human error. The human firewall is vital as a line of defence for any organisation and in this video Rob, author of The Human Firewall (available on Amazon) explains what the Human Firewall is.

Find out more about ramsac’s cybersecurity services

Cyber Chat – Episode 7 – video transcript

Hi, I’m Rob May, MD of ramsac and welcome to Cyber Chat. I want to talk to you today about porn stars. No, not like that! When I did my Ted talk. I walked out onto the stage and behind me I had this great big sign saying, We’re all porn stars. And interestingly enough a whole load of people have said oh you know you called your Ted talk, We’re all porn stars. I didn’t the Ted talk was called the Human Firewall but interestingly it’s the porn star thing that people have remembered.

But why did I do that? The reason I did it was on social media, you often get games, you get little quizzes that usually say just for fun. And one of the ones that I’d seen was about your porn star name, and what it inferred was that every single one of us has a porn star name. And to find out your porn star name, you take the name of your first pet followed by the first part of the road that you lived on when you were growing up. And for me that worked out as “Smokey Pound”. Which I guess works and the thing is the results are funny and if you watch my Ted talk you’ll see that there’s a great deal of laughter in the audience and actually for one minute. I thought I’d lost the audience and I wasn’t going to get them back. But the thing is people participate because it’s funny.

There was one during the general election to find out what your Tory MP name was and again It was a mix of things like this, and on that one there had been 4,000 responses, when I saw it and they always say just for fun. But the thing is there not fun. There sinister, people use this to gather information, it’s a form of Social Engineering. And people use it to gather information on you and what I’ve asked you to share there with your porn star name is information that you might use for your password retrieval, for things like your online banking. So, when you see these and you’ll see the more and more now, once they’ve been brought to your attention, you see them, all the time.

I’m constantly being emailed them. Where people have seen me talking and then say, Oh, here’s another one. What you need to do is firstly not participate yourself, but also point them out to your family and friends to make sure that they’re not participating and they’re not falling foul of the scam.
So, I hope that’s been useful and I look forward to speaking to you again soon. Thank you.