Watch Out for Social Media “Surveys”

With everyone spending more time at home, traffic on social media sites has grown tremendously. One particular item to avoid during this time of boredom meltdown, even though they may be fun, are so-called “surveys” on social media sites. You know, the ones that ask about favorite colors, pet’s names, mother’s maiden name, what schools you attended, favorite songs, movies, cars, or whatever? Do these questions sound familiar?

If you have ever set up backup “security questions” for a web site, you’ll notice the surveys ask for many of the same bits of information. A fair percentage of these surveys are simply intended to grab your username for the social network, then slyly ask you to hand over potential security question answers.

Don’t fill out these surveys. Yeah, they can be fun, maybe, but if the information you willingly hand over may allow someone to reset your password by knowing the answers to your security questions, then they are a really bad idea!

With that in mind, whenever you fill out these backup security questions, you should never put real information in as your answers. Make up answers for these questions, then record those answers somewhere safe, like in a password manager, along with your unique password for the site! This way, you can provide the answers to these questions, but no one else will be able to discover than information from the far reaches of the Internet, or from your answers to a social media site “survey”.

If you would like more information on password managers, check out the short password manager article here on this site.

If you haven’t signed up for multi-factor authentication (MFA), what are you waiting for? This adds an additional layer of protection to your Berry account and lets you keep the same password for a whole year! Setup take only a few minutes. Make your request by emailing computing@berry.edu to tell them you want MFA!

If you’re not following Berry OIT on Facebook (@BerryCollegeOIT), Twitter (@berryoit), or Instagram (@berrycollegeoit), you should be, as more information from OIT and specifically Information Security, will be provided using these outlets. Remember you can always check back here for warnings about current phishing emails, confirmations of valid emails you might have a question about, and data breach notifications. There’s also the Q&A section, where you can ask a question and get an answer directly from me, and the events calendar where events like tables in Krannert and LunchITS will be posted.

Photo Credit: Photo by William Iven on Unsplash