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Course: NOVA Labs > Unit 1
Lesson 2: CybersecurityA cyber privacy parable
Follow the trials and tribulations of Tim as a seemingly innocent piece of digital information threatens to ruin his life when it falls into the wrong hands.
Want to join the conversation?
- Are there any ways to audit your own web behavior and information? It'd be useful if there was a way to check up on myself and see how difficult it is to find my personal information. I'm sure there's always ways around security, but I'd rather not be the easy low hanging fruit to be picked.(15 votes)
- Well, you could ask a friend to check for you because sometimes they see things you don't, but the best way is to check your settings. Most social networking sites have options to try to keep your identity safe. Usually you can take out any private info that you do not want to share to the world. If you have private info that you do not want to share but cannot take it off, its probably best to stay away from that site.(8 votes)
- You could also get Tim's name, address, and phone number from a phone book. How did posting the photo make this worse?(12 votes)
- You are correct that most of the information was previously accessible in other ways. However, the biggest difference now is that the information is much easier to correlate, and the information is much more democratically available, and it rarely, if ever, goes away.
These factors means that it is much easier for small groups or even individuals to accomplish what could have only been done by large groups or nation-states decades ago.(8 votes)
- Is this a true story just with the names changed?(4 votes)
- No, this is not necessarily a true story, but it can happen. In fact, you're account can easily be hacked. Lets say you told someone you love puppys and your favorite number is 17. So they use that information for your password. If it works, thats the easy way. If it doesn't, well, you can look up how to hack.(4 votes)
- How did they find his social security number?(1 vote)
- He posted it on his favorite social network.(2 votes)
- Is there any way to protect my own computer?(1 vote)
- Why do we use codes with only the number 1 and 0?(1 vote)
- why would his house number + the information he had posted make the crime ring able to hack into his bank account?(1 vote)
- Why keeping your softwares up-to-date will better secure your information online?(1 vote)
- Hi Julie,
Keeping software updated will definitely help you in protecting you computer for example it was just this year a major breach in some hospitals computers gained access to files etc. most experts reported that they didn't update there software as told and in this lead to a big breach.(1 vote)
- He posted it online with the server.(1 vote)
- I feel really bad for Tim... can this really happen in real life even though it is called a "worst case" scenario?(1 vote)
- Yes, but it's kind of rare that all that would happen. For the most part I'm talking about your shorts being mistaken as a rebel flag...(1 vote)
Video transcript
You’ve probably heard that you need to be
careful about what you post online. Well, here’s a story that will explain why. Once upon a time, a nice fellow named Tim
uploaded a picture of himself to his favorite social network. It wasn’t a bad picture, maybe a little
goofy, but innocent enough. Little did Tim know that this photo would
be his downfall. When Tim uploaded his photo to the internet,
it was stored in a few places. One of these was the server of Tim’s favorite
social network, which allowed all of his friends to see it. Another was a government server that picked
up lots of information from the internet in case it could be useful down the line. And the third was the server of an identity
theft crime ring. Back on the social network, a few of Tim’s
friends gave their approval to his picture, but most ignored it. Meanwhile, the social network made his data
available to an advertising firm. They noticed the Frisbee in Tim’s photo,
and started sending him Frisbee ads, hoping that he’d buy more Frisbees. Unfortunately, he would not be able to, because
of what happened next. You see, the identity theft crime ring liked
Tim’s photo much more than his friends did. That’s because it showed his house in the
background. One of the pieces of data in the image file
was the exact location where the photo was taken, allowing them to figure out Tim’s
address. Now, this crime ring had already collected
some other information about Tim that he had unwittingly posted online, including his phone
number and social security number. So they called Tim’s bank, pretended to
be him, and tricked the bank into resetting his password using all of the information
they had. Needless to say, they transferred all of Tim’s
money into their own pockets. They also gained access to his email accounts
and sent his friends malware that stole their bank account information. This was bad for Tim’s social life. To console himself over the loss of his friends,
Tim took a vacation halfway across the world, and by strange coincidence chose the very
same country that had intercepted his photo. Unfortunately for poor Tim, the nifty design
on his shorts was also the flag of a rebel army trying to overthrow that country’s
government, and he was identified as a possible threat. So he was pulled aside at security and denied
entry. Tim’s story is pretty much a worst-case
scenario, and is almost certainly not what is going to happen the next time you post
a picture online. But each of these things does happen to people
on a daily basis…except for maybe the rebel army bit. Information that you post publicly can be
stored by anyone who finds it, and your private communications might be intercepted and read
by advertisers, news outlets, governments, and criminals alike. In fact, over ten million Americans have their
identities stolen each year. So try to be careful about what information
you post online, keep all of your software up to date, and make secure passwords that
are different for each site you visit. These problems will probably never go away—unless
we invent a completely secure way of communicating and sharing with each other online. Sorry, Tim.