Cybersecurity specialists told how criminals use photos from social networks

How many times have they told the world … and parents should not post photos of their children on social networks. It would seem that Russians should increasingly master the skills of safe behavior on the Web, but no. There are still many careless mothers and fathers, which is what criminals and mentally ill people use. The surprise was a figure revealed in the course of a survey by one well-known company in the field of IT security – almost half of Russian parents still post a lot of information about their children on social networks. “MK” talked with experts, what is fraught with

The reasons for this behavior of parents are generally clear. Their answers were collected by the same company: 47% of the adults surveyed want to keep memories, 44% are proud of the child and his achievements, 42% want to share information about his life with relatives and friends who are also registered in social networks. At the same time, almost half of mothers and fathers do not even ask the consent of their child to publish his personal information, although the kids can be quite old – 14-18 years old.

What kind of data are parents not afraid to publish? In their proud posts, moms and dads indicate the name of the child (59%), his hobbies (42%), events from his life (42%), the name of the school or university (14%), and a third of the respondents even geolocation (31%) .

Experts point out that by acting in this way, people may face online security risks. Only 20% of parents know the password for the child’s account in any of the social networks and periodically go there. And 17% of moms and dads showed amazing indifference – they don’t go to the page of their children at all, even as third-party users, and don’t know what their child does there, what he posts, what groups he belongs to.

Safe Internet League expert Nikita Pavlukhin advises “always check that the geolocation function (place tag) is enabled when you take a photo.” You can turn this feature on or off in the camera settings on your phone.

“We recommend posting as few photos of yourself and your children as possible, especially from home, work or school,” he warns. “Sometimes, even from the most innocuous photograph, a criminal can obtain extensive information about a person.

Let us remind adults what such carelessness and negligence is fraught with.

Firstly, data can be transferred to advertisers, who then begin to impose this or that product on you and your child.

– Any placement of additional information allows you to profile this data, compiling a certain knowledge base, and train neural networks (and often they are foreign in our country) to analyze user data in order to sell this data later, – explains an expert in the field of Internet crime investigations, chairman Council for Combating Technological Offenses (Coordinating Council of the Non-State Sphere of Security of Russia) Igor Bederov.

According to the expert, the social network itself is interested in analyzing the information posted by the user as clearly and correctly as possible in order to provide its advertisers with more opportunities for the most targeted (aimed at the target audience) advertising. This means to sell a person at the very moment when he needs this or that thing or product from the most profitable seller. For this, all data that the user has about himself and other persons, children, friends, etc. are analyzed.

But this is not so bad, in any case, there is no great danger here. Here’s what you really need to watch out for:

– An immediate threat to children may lie in the fact that public information is analyzed not only by conditional anonymous algorithms of social networks in the framework of big data, but also by individual employees of social networks, who, among other things, may be with certain mental disabilities, continues Bederov. – And since there is a human factor, they can open these accounts, read what is there, and then try to sneak into the trust of the child.

Worse, external criminals do the same thing – drug addicts, pedophiles, terrorists. Children can be involved in various illegal communities: suicidal, terrorist, “swater” (false mining) and others. Experts explain this by the fact that children, especially in a difficult period of 13-15 years, are very dependent on the need to communicate with people who understand them, are their peers and seem to be part of the community in which they develop. “Yes, this is an erroneous idea, but the child wants to communicate with those who understand him, and criminals have a lot of such psychological tricks,” the specialist emphasized.

Well, of course, the publication of this data with a systematic collection allows you to track the user, control his movement, track down the address of residence, friends, etc. “The use of accounts that are not protected by additional means of identification and complex passwords allows attackers to easily break them and further distribute various “begging”, extortionate offers or malware viruses from a hacked account,” Igor Bederov warned.

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