Over 17 million Lady Gaga Twitter followers and 45 million Facebook fans were startled around Christmas time when they saw her message about giving away free iPad 2s. More than generous, the gifts would have cost the celeb over $20 billion! But, it didn’t take much time for followers to realise that the tweets and updates were false. This is not a one of its kind case. Teenage singer Selena Gomez and Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher have been victims of hacking too. And as more and more celebrities — ranging from actors to sportspersons to politicians and wannabes — join the social networking bandwagon, the chances of their accounts being hacked into are increasing.
“The cases of a security meltdown at Twitter and Facebook have made me look at any tweet or an update twice, and then react. The sites serve as platforms for celebrities to interact with their fans around the globe, and so their scraps are generally responsible acts. But with prolific hacking, followers need to be sure of the rightness of any scrap,” says Tanuj Kathuria, a geek and engineering student at Kurukshetra University.
Technology expert Prasanto Kumar Roy says that the number of hacks on celebrity accounts is on the upswing and so users must wear their “seat belts.”
“Celebs are easy targets because many (especially recent entrants) are unfamiliar with the ‘safety hygiene’ on the Net. They are also considered ‘fun to target’ and so give the anonymous hacker a great sense of power to be able to pull down well-known figures. Celebs are soft targets, and unlike military or political figures, will not fight the establishment. And last, the impact on sites like Twitter and Facebook is very high, as in one stroke the hacker can publicise his work to hundreds of thousands of followers, making him or her an overnight success,” says Roy.
Beside reading and appreciating false tweets/updates, there are other dangers for celebrity watchers. An estimate by Web publication TechCrunch states that anyone (at least 7,000 people), who clicked on the links in Lady Gaga’s tweets got a virus that had the potential to cause major damage to their computers. Venkatasubrahmanyam Krishnapur, senior director, McAfee India, says that cyber criminals follow what’s hot, just like any user. “They look for the latest trends and create malicious software within those sites that is designed to steal your passwords, bank details and personal information. They are now also disguising malicious software in places like shortened URLs that can spread virally on Twitter and Facebook.”
Technology experts advise users to have safe (non-guessable) passwords, not to be shared with anyone. Other advice includes avoiding storing passwords in obvious places such as mobile phone address books, etc; clicking on links from unfamiliar sources and evading downloading; running anything unknown on your system except from trusted sources; and treating all your email accounts, even less critical ones, with the same care — as hackers usually get in from such channels. And last but not least, as security researcher at Websense Security Labs Elad Sharf says, “Don’t believe everything you read. And if it sounds too good to be true, be extra cautious clicking on that link. If you see a suspicious messages or find your contacts being spammy, it might be that the account has been compromised. Also, think about the value of information (phone number, etc) you’re giving away and to whom you’re giving it.”