Social media connection requests are not always real

Meet Lynne. She sent you a social media connection request. Here’s some background on Lynne. Happily married to a professional athlete. Real estate agent in San Francisco. Runs three marathons a year. Promised her mom she would visit all seven continents before turning 50. Laughs and walks away when you try talking politics.

Would you accept a social media connection request from Lynne? She looks decent and honest, right?

Fake profile

Think twice. She is fake. I visited https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/ and chose three pictures for my book. I wrote the profiles from scratch. https://www.thispersondoesnotexist.com/ uses a generative adversarial network, defined at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network to create pictures. Wikipedia tells us “a GAN trained on photographs can generate new photographs that look at least superficially authentic to human observers, having many realistic characteristics.”

Computer-generated

The pictures are computer-generated. Although computer-generated, they all show imperfections that make them more credible. Lynne is probably not a natural blond. How much time do you take before accepting connection requests? Facebook and LinkedIn present these in a list. You glance and choose to accept or ignore. Twitter lets people follow you without asking you first.

Facebook lets you post content and choose if you want to share it with Public (anyone on Facebook) or your Friends. If your Facebook Friends are fake, then who is seeing information you want to share with people who are only friends?

The more you share online, the more you volunteer to someone who wants to steal your identity. This information includes where you live, where you work, your education, your family, your car, what you do for fun and your travel plans. Some people post pictures of their kids online. Hackers use this information to build profiles and hijack your identity. Social media is a library, for a hacker performing reconnaissance on you, their next target.

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Content from How Hacks Happen and how to protect yourself. Visit https://howhackshappen.com and view three chapters online for FREE today. By Mark Anthony Germanos, of https://cybersafetynet.net/about-cyber-safety-net/.