We all know there are risks to storing personal information online, yet few of us take even the most basic precautions, like choosing unique and hard-to-guess passwords.
On Thursday, Google will introduce a tool, known as two-step verification, that will make Google accounts more secure and less vulnerable to hackers and phishing scams.
Google users who choose to use the tool will still enter their passwords to get to Google accounts like Gmail, Picasa and Google Docs. But they will also need to enter a second verification code, generated on the spot for one-time use and sent to their cellphone through a text message, phone call or app.
“Passwords tend to be the weakest link in the process of securing a Google account,” said Nishit Shah, a product manager for Google security who worked on the project. “We wanted to improve the security of the account in a way that is not just something the user knows, the password, but what the user has, the phone.”
The threat is a real one. For instance, a hacker reached personal and business information about Twitter and its executives by breaking into e-mail accounts. And when you get those e-mails that say friends are abroad and in dire need of money, a phishing scheme is to blame.
Google’s new operating system for laptops, called Chrome OS, stores all of a user’s information in the cloud and none of it on a computer hard drive, making strong security even more important.
Businesses have used tools that require several passwords to access company systems for years, and Google started offering its business customers the service last year. But consumer Web sites haven’t done it, in part because the security hardware that companies give employees, like key fobs, is expensive and inconvenient.
Google has tried to overcome that by delivering the codes on cellphones, something most people have with them all the time. Users can provide a backup phone number in case their phone is dead or lost, and receive a list of 10 backup codes to use if they can’t get the codes via phone. And people who don’t want to enter two codes each time they access their Google account can tell Google to remember the code for 30 days.
Google users can find a link to set up two-step verification on the account settings page.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is famous for having the world's largest collection of Vincent Van Gogh's drawings and paintings. But it has another reason to draw our attention today - scammers have managed to compromise its official Facebook presence.
Regular readers of Sophos's Naked Security site will be only too familiar with the survey scams that plague Facebook, spread usually via rogue applications that have used social engineering to trick innocent users into giving their permission to post to their walls.
What may surprise some is that this isn't just a problem for your personal Facebook pages - it can also affect fan pages which you may administer (for instance, pages which represent your organisation or company).
In other words, if your personal page falls foul of a scam then the bad guys can also automatically post messages to your company Facebook page too - potentially impacting the thousands of fans you have been carefully nurturing.
Clicking on the link takes you to a version of the money-making "I was logged into Facebook for XXXX hours in 2010" scam that we have warned Facebook users about before.
The Van Gogh Museum has posted an update on its page, apologising for the spam messages and asking how it can prevent the abuse happening again:
We're so sorry about the automatic spam messages that seem to keep on appearing on this page about the hours we've been loged on to facebook. We did not post these! Does anyone know how we could prevent this happening again?
Normally, it's pretty straight forward to clean-up your Facebook account after being hit by a survey scam. I described how to do it in a video I made late last year, where I show how you can clean out rogue applications that you have mistakenly allowed to access your Facebook profile.
I would suggest that all of the Van Gogh Museum's Facebook administrators follow that advice and make sure that they have locked down their Facebook profiles appropriately and chosen hard-to-crack unique passwords.
But there may be another issue.
The scammers have posted messages to the Van Gogh Museum's Facebook page via the Mobile Uploads photo gallery.
That's the facility Facebook supplies to post status updates to your Facebook page remotely, just by sending an email to a unique address (every Facebook account has a specific email address for this purpose).
If someone was able to work out the museum's unique email address for uploading mobile photographs then they would be able to post photos (and links to their survey scams) with ease.
It may, therefore, be time for the museum to refresh its mobile upload email address. By the way, it's not clear to me if you can tell Facebook to not allow any email address to be used for mobile uploads, but I would imagine that many institutions would find the permanent blocking of the feature attractive.
There's a lesson here for everybody, of course. If your company runs a Facebook page then you and your administrators will need to be on their toes to prevent harm being done if scammers manage to compromise it.
Learn more about the different threats which Facebook users and companies face by joining the Sophos page on Facebook.
Hat tip: Thanks to Naked Security reader Aniko for informing us about the incident involving the Van Gogh museum.
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