John to speak on Employee Engagement at the APPA National Conference June 2017 in Orlando, FL. Learn more 
May 31st, 2017 
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Credit: iStock/almagani
Did you participate in Facebook’s recent “10 concerts” meme? You know the one — Facebook users were invited to list nine concerts they actually attended and one they didn’t. Their FB friends were asked to guess which one was not, in fact, attended by that person. The meme swept through FB-land like wildfire, drawing millions of responses in a matter of days.
For my Facebook friends that participated in that meme (one person I know listed 50 concerts he had gone to in his life), I learned a lot about their musical tastes. Scammers may have too. If the password to your email, bank account or credit card is some variant of “Pink Floyd” or “Brad Paisley,” you may soon be the victim of a scam.
Credit: iStock/ridofranze
Hopefully you were not a victim of the “Can you hear me?” phone-based scam, which started making the rounds in early 2017. This is the one where you receive a call and the caller starts by asking, “Can you hear me?” When unsuspecting victims answered “yes,” they exposed themselves to all sorts of trouble in their digital and financial world.
More recently, we have the WannaCry ransomware scam, which affected tens of thousands of computers in over 100 countries. Hopefully you were not hit with this.
Just last month, word got out about the newest cyberattack, where hackers were able to embed malware directly into social media posts. “While corporations and government agencies around the world are training their staff to think twice before opening anything sent by email, hackers have already moved on to a new kind of attack, targeting social media accounts, where people are more likely to be trusting,” The New York Times reported.
Great, next the scammers will find a way to get directly inside the fillings in my teeth.
Cyber attacks and scams work because scammers are masters of social engineering, the art of taking bits of information someone provides and using it against them. It’s not that the victims are dumb, it’s that the scammers are playing on another level.
