Thursday, April 5, 2018

PSA: That Facebook quiz may be hackers mining your personal information.

Social media quizzes – especially popular on Facebook – seem innocent enough. But taking the quiz might mean you are giving away more about yourself than you originally thought, and may extend to your friends as well.

These quizzes ask seemingly silly or useless questions, but hackers can use that information to penetrate your social accounts and gain access to your personal information or the information of your friends and family.

Some quizzes are designed to steal your data in an outright scam. Once answered, hackers can easily hijack personal accounts and use them to lure in more victims. The hackers will include links embedded in the quiz that can cause a security breach of your personal accounts.

But the latest news shows that it isn’t just scammers who are interested in your quiz answers. It turns out, your personal information is big business.

Not all social media quizzes are about unprincipled data collection, but the Better Business Bureau cautions users to be careful about what they share online. Profile data, quiz answers, and more can be used to used to steal your money, or let a scammer pretend to be you in order to steal someone else’s money.

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