Social Media
For various reasons, people tend to give out personal information more freely via social media than they do face-to-face.
While the majority of users are harmless, social media predators rely on your posts, tweets, feeds, check-ins, and connections in order to attack you.
The more information that you post about yourself, the more susceptible you are to crime like identity theft, financial fraud, and even more frightening crimes like stalking and even assault.
Preventative Measures Against Social Media Attacks
Limit the amount of personal information you post.Use common sense. Don't post anything makes you uncomfortable. Posting vacation pictures, or posting photos of yourself while you're out for the night, has been known to lead to home burglaries.
Remember that the internet is a public resource.Limit the personal information you share, and don’t share business information at all. Disable Global Position System (GPS) encoding or location tracking. Many digital cameras encode the GPS location of a photo when it is taken. If that photo is uploaded to a site, so are the GPS coordinates, which will let people know that exact location.
Don't use public Wi-Fi.Public Wi-Fi is not secure. Lamar University provides secure Wi-Fi access and secure remote access thru VPN for employees and students.
Be skeptical.The Internet makes it easy to hide identities and motives. Be extremely cautious about giving information to strangers.
Use strong passwords.Passwords are your first line of defense.
Evaluate your settings.Take advantage of a site’s privacy settings, and even when you have high security settings, use caution. Don’t post anything you wouldn't want the public to see. Options change periodically, so review them regularly.
Check privacy policies.Some sites may share phone numbers and emails with other companies.
Use and maintain anti-virus protection.Anti-virus protection safeguards your computer against known viruses. Use it, and keep it updated.
