How to Stay Unsafe in Social Networks

It was about time for me to start blogging on hotforsecurity.com. I was planning this step for some time now, but I never actually did it (besides the short movies on security). I decided that today is the big day, so this can be considered as my first official post here:

(please smile and read carefully – you obviously will like this)

You probably noticed that we just launched safego, our newest app to stay safe while spending time on Facebook. What does it do? It scans your wall posts, comments from friends and your inbox messages for spam, phishing and malware. Also, it shows your privacy level, which should warn you if it is considerably low.

Since this is a special event, I was thinking to complement it with some safety tips for social networks.

By the way, did you ever search for “safety tips for social networks”? Turns out, Google returns over 13 800 results, which means that if I`m going to give you some safety tips, this is probably going to be article number 13 801. Highly unoriginal! So why not give you tips on how to stay unsafe? I couldn`t get any results on that, so it seems original enough to start writing about it 😀

Top 9.5 tips on how to stay unsafe in social networks

1. Why would you use a secure password? After all, the account is free. If something happens to it, you will just create a new one! (I was going to ask “why use a password at all?” but the answer is: because you have to). So a good password can be: “aaaaa” or “123456789” or maybe just “password`

2. It`s called a social network, so be social. Talk to everybody, accept any friendship invitation, it really doesn`t matter who they really are

3. People share a lot of stuff on these networks, so if you get some interesting link, you just have to check it out. It will certainly be cool.

4. Let everyone know your birthday. You want people to wish you happy birthday on that special day. How else would they know the date?

5. Share your email address. How else people can send you emails if they don`t know your address?

6. Share pictures with everybody. That`s why you are uploading them anyway, right?

7. Share your location. Maybe somebody wants to send you a gift”¦. How can they do that if they do not know your address?

8. Be specific when you leave the house. Post things like: “going away for 4 days. Nobody is at home” so people can know not to come to visit you since you`re not there

9. Don`t use a security solution. It takes the fun part out when browsing the internet

9.5 Remember, always stay unsafe!