Mainers, We Need To Stop Answering Facebook Quizzes And Memes.

There's always some new scam going online to try and get your information out of you. Hackers and thieves get better and better at it all the time. I got an email sent to my work email this week that looked like it legit came from Google. It was nearly perfect. But it was a recovery notification to an account that didn't exist anymore.

I've gotten pretty good at catching the email ones. They're usually fairly obvious. But there are much more sinister ways of doing it that I'm personally seeing more and more all the time. And frankly, it's a technique that preys on our most vulnerable internet population.... older folks.

Now forgive me for calling out anyone about their age. But what's happening is this: there are all these "conversation starters" or quizzes that want to know all sorts of seemingly benign info about you. Where'd you go to high school, or what was your first pet. But these kinds of questions get a lot of useful info about you for a crook.

There's also all the memes that say "Your WWE superstar name is the color of your shirt, plus the name of your first street." These are also designed to get your info. Anytime someone wants to know your high school or street, they're looking for answers to your security questions.

They want all that info, because people so often draw on that sort of thing for passwords, security questions, and login information. You give up a serious amount of personal information when you participate in one of these quizzes, etc. Most folks of a few less years tend to spot these things a mile away.

For legal reasons, I can't actually show one of the memes, but here's a link to exactly what I'm talking about, with many different examples of the kind of things hackers are phishing with. It's kind of frightening how innocent they seem, yet how much information they cause a person to give out.

But say, my mother, who's not super internet savvy, could easily be fooled by one of these, and accidentally give up all sorts of potentially harmful info for hackers. So it's up to us to educate our parents a bit more, so they aren't taken in by such things. sure, it's a great way to pass some time, but that's about it. Otherwise, it's pure risk.

You know exactly the type of memes and such we're talking about, likely. show them to your parents, or grandparents and try to help protect them. Their funds are limited, and so is their knowledge of the web, so be a good kid and help 'em out! Besides, it'll probably be you trying to help sort it out if it goes bad. Good luck!