Social media connection requests are not always real

Meet Tom. He sent you a social media connection request. Here’s some background on Tom. Single. Medical student. Works part time at a coffee shop in Palo Alto. Plays computer games in his precious free time. Promises to cure dementia, which has stricken his grandmother. Tells friends the country will be screwed up until we elect Bernie Sanders President and he cancels student loan debt.

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

Fake profile

Think twice. He 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. Tom’s teeth are yellow (probably from too much coffee). 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/.