Podcast Episode Details

Facebook’s Fake Account Crackdown, Privacy Upgrade to HTTPS, New Security Features in Apple iOS 12 – WB36

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This is your Shared Security Weekly Blaze for October 1st 2018 with your host, Tom Eston. In this week’s episode: Facebook’s fake account crackdown, privacy upgrade to HTTPS, and new security features in Apple iOS 12.

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Hi everyone, this is Tom Eston, Co-host of the Shared Security podcast. Welcome to the Shared Security Weekly Blaze where we update you on the top 3 security and privacy topics from the week. These weekly podcasts are published every Monday and are 15 minutes or less quickly giving you “news that you can use”.

Facebook has recently taken a tougher stand against fake profiles, specifically ones being used by law enforcement. In a letter that Facebook sent to the Memphis Police Department, Facebook states they have disabled fake accounts that were set up by the police department because they violate Facebook’s terms of service which notes, you must use your real name while using the social network. Privacy advocates like the EFF have been critical of this position in the past since in some cases, free speech may put certain users at risk if real identities are being used. However, regardless of how you feel about this policy, it’s good to see Facebook applying these rules to everyone, including law enforcement. In fact, as the EFF has pointed out, Facebook recently updated their help page titled “Information for Law Enforcement Authorities” and under their misrepresentation policy they state “People on Facebook are required to use the name they go by in everyday life and must not maintain multiple accounts. Operating fake accounts, pretending to be someone else, or otherwise misrepresenting your authentic identity is not allowed, and we will act on violating accounts”.

Law enforcement aside, fake accounts on Facebook have always been a problem ever since Facebook started getting popular around 2008. In fact, I remember giving a talk at a hacker conference about social network bots and the underground criminal networks that had created automated tools and scripts to target unsuspecting social network users. Check out our show notes for a link to this talk and a nostalgic look into the younger version of yours truly. Oh, and in full disclosure, I may have pushed the limits of fake account creation back then as well. Now I gave that talk back in 2009 but bots and fake accounts are still running rampant on Facebook and other social networks.  They are even using those same techniques I talked about back then to friend thousands of strangers in order to solicit SPAM or to get them to click on links which lead to malware and phishing scams. The best advice to avoid becoming a victim of a fake account or bot in your friends list is to only accept friend requests from people you actually know in real life. But even that can lead to problems though, especially if someone is impersonating one of your friends. Our advice is to contact that friend out of band, for example, via a text message or phone call, to verify that they are who they say they are.

In other late breaking Facebook news last Friday, a serious vulnerability in the “View As” profile feature was identified by Facebook’s own engineers that affects almost 50 million accounts. The vulnerability allowed attackers to steal the access tokens w

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Published on 7 years, 2 months ago