Quote:That photo that appears when someone disables his or her Zoom video, or those photos of a remote worker’s home office shared on Instagram may seem innocuous and playful. However, they could become ammunition for threat actors to launch targeted scams and put personal and critical data at risk, a cybersecurity researcher has warned.
Jason Nurse, an associate professor in cybersecurity at the University of Kent, and a visiting academic at the University of Oxford, cautioned that personal photos and information shared via various online platforms used by remote workers can expose not only the employee, but also corporate networks, to threats from savvy attackers who are looking to exploit personal data. He shared his thoughts in a post published Wednesday on Sophos Naked Security blog.
With more workers online than ever due to the COVID-19 pandemic, people have gotten so comfortable with sharing photos and other personal information online that they may not be aware of how it can be misused, Nurse said.
Moreover, the pandemic in general has been stressful for everyone as people try to juggle their everyday lives amid the disruption to daily routine, which means that people have their guard down more than ever when cyberattackers come calling.
“While the sharing of such photos may seem harmless and even a must-do at the time, the reality is that we are, once again, falling into the age-old trap of oversharing,” he wrote in the post. “We are forgetting to ask ourselves: What might a criminal or fraudster do with this information?”
The answer is quite a lot, Nurse surmised. That’s because the more a threat actor knows about a person, the more he or she and the company they are working for are vulnerable to attack, he said.
Read more: https://threatpost.com/home-office-photo...or/164460/