What do Social Engineering Quizzes Collect?

In this video, we’re going to be talking about why you need to be careful about what you’re posting on social media quizzes, and how it could be used for social engineering against you. So there’s a lot of different quizzes out on social media– things like Facebook, Twitter, and whatnot. And a lot of times, these can be a lot of fun and generally pretty safe. However, even the ones that aren’t intentionally trying to social engineer you or hack you, they can be dangerous. So let’s take a look at some of these. So what kind of information are we giving up between the quizzes that we’re taking and what we’re posting on our social media accounts?

Well, let’s take a look at this one. “Time to test your memory. Who can remember the following? Post your answers? Who was your favourite teacher? Who was your first grade teacher? What was your first car? What street or road did you grow up on? What was your first pet’s name? What was your first job? Who was your first girlfriend or boyfriend?” Now, these look pretty innocent. And if someone posted this, it may, again, totally be unintentional. And it might actually be a legitimate fun quiz. But think about these type of questions. Does this seem familiar? Because it really should. These are also some of the most common security questions.

“What is your favourite book?: Which generally people can get from things like Facebook profiles, where people post, “Hey, my favourite book is X.” “What name or road did you grow up on? What’s your mother’s maiden name? What’s the name of your first current favourite pet? What’s your first company that you worked for? Where did you meet your spouse? And, where did you go to high school or college?” So answering questions like that, posting information up, could potentially compromise our security. Things like bank accounts, or social media accounts and whatnot, these are typical security questions. So how do we avoid this? Be mindful of what you answer. Be very careful about what you post and what you answer online.

Is it public or private? Is the quiz you’re taking public or private? And do you know who’s giving the quiz out? If you don’t, you probably don’t want to answer those questions. Even if you do know the person, those are really bad questions to answer. Changing your security– security challenge questions, for the most part, in my opinion, are pretty poor. Again, we saw that even innocent things like “What’s your favourite book?”– again, Facebook asks different questions like, “Hey, what’s your favourite movie? What’s your favourite book?”, and what not. These are really bad security questions, because you might inadvertently post something, and it might come up as a security question, which, yeah, it could compromise your account.

You might consider coming up with alternate answers. Things like, “What’s your favourite car? Well, banana”. Things like that. If you choose an alternate answer, just try to remember what it is. And again, this is where a password manager could come in really handy. So these were some ways how social engineering can be used in social media quizzes. So again, be careful. Be mindful of what you’re answering. And as always, be very mindful of your security. In the next video, we’re going to take a look at how to identify bots on Twitter. Thank you for watching. I’ll see you next video.