BLOG RE-WRITE: The Normalcy of Facebook Hacking

Everyone has received a suspicious looking email from a friend's email address. The subject line usually consists of phrases like "Check this out!" or "Urgent Employment Information." In the body of the email, an awkward looking URL address is hyper-linked. A savvy internet user notices all these things and simply deletes the email and notifies their friend, rather than clicking on the link. This happens all too frequently in today's world. It has spread to social networking sites such as Facebook, in particular. Random and awkward looking posts emerge onto users timelines with the same wordings as the spam emails. As explained on weekendPicture's corkboard website, Toby Miller gives specifics to his recent experience when it comes to Facebook hacking. He talks about how the post was sent to all his Facebook friends. While he describes how his friends noticed that the post indeed looked strange and not like something he would write, he is one of, probably, millions of people who have had this done to their Facebook page. Hackers continue to find ways to spam accounts.

With today's technology landscape, forums of all varieties exist and people from all over the world can join in on discussions about pretty much anything. Obviously, some of these discussions are not about good and beneficial things to society. As pointed out in this Bloomberg article, hackers are creating and joining forums together to discuss new ways of hacking. Most of their focus is aimed at Facebook. With all the applications available on the social networking site, the opportunities for hacking and spamming are endless. Before being able to use any of these applications, the user has to allow the application to view all the information they have on Facebook. This forum that the Bloomberg article is showcasing is a great tool and resource for hackers. They want to lure the user's Facebook friends to visit the website they've hyper-linked in the post. Facebook is the main focus of these hackers because of the large amount of users they have. The ability to reach a billion people is an offer too good to refuse for hackers. Having these forums will continue the appearance of these awkward and computer harming posts.

Despite all these annoying and troublesome hacking and spamming, it definitely will not be coming to an end anytime soon. While spam filters and internet users become more sophisticated, forums such as the one mentioned above will allow hackers to keep up to speed. There will always be someone who is one more step ahead than the rest. Legitimate websites of corporations and television networks still get hacked to this day. Experiences similar to Toby Miller will become all too frequent. Social implications come into play as employers and family members will have access to an individual's profile. Miller was very worried about how these posts made him look. As hacking continues and becomes a shared experience among users, people on Facebook must know what is a genuine post and what is a hacked post.

 

Privacy concerns also come into play. As consumers continually use their credit cards online for shopping and allowing social media applications to access their personal information, hackers will have more ways to infiltrate users' personal files. There are only so many passwords an individual can remember. When a recipient of these spam emails and posts actually clicks on the link, their personal and computer data are retrieved by the spam site as well. Users of the internet will ultimately have to enter their personal information on a website at some point in their lives if they want to access media content, e-mail, shopping, and other applications. While there are certain symbols, such as the logo of the Better Business Bureau, to showcase that a website is legitimate, not all users know this information. The downside, once again, is that no matter how educated users become, hackers will continue to find new ways to access personal information. It almost seems to be a right of passage for an online user to be spammed or hacked.