How your digital footprint can be used by hackers

Introduction

In the cyber world, everything we do, the places we visit, and the online content that we read and write is stored and can be traced back to the individual. This opens up a lot of doors for researching any individual’s background, interests, activities, behaviors, likes and dislikes. From the perspective of a hacker, this personal information can be used for a variety of hostile activities, such as the compromise of accounts, identity theft, burglary, etc.

How will a hacker use your digital footprint?

If you become the target of a hacker (for example if you are a board member or an IT administrator of a company) your personal information has higher value. Some examples of how a hacker will use your personal information are summarised below: 

• Breached Passwords – A hacker could easily reuse the breached password to gain access to your other accounts.
• Personal Email addresses – The identification of personal email addresses can give a hacker something to target as personal email address is normally used as the username of login credentials of many online services. If your personal email account is breached, it could be used to find more personal information or sensitive information from your email history (for example the password to your company’s systems).
• Residence address – A rogue WiFi access point (AP) can be placed outside of your residence impersonating a legitimate WiFi network. Once your personal devices are connected to the AP, your network traffic can be seen by the hacker.
• Hobbies – Your hobbies can be used to tailor a targeted phishing attack scenario to compromise your laptop or even your company’s network.
• Personal website – If your personal website has security vulnerabilities which can be exploited, a hacker may compromise your personal website and underlying server to get more sensitive information or gain access to your personal network.
• Family members’ personal information – Your family members’ personal information (for example your mother’s name) may be the answers to the security questions. A hacker can use this information together with other information to get access to your account in some cases.

Each of these details by themselves presents some security risk, but combining sensitive information about an individual may have greater impact. Hackers can always find creative ways to use this information and tailor attacking scenarios to achieve their objectives.

Conclusion

You should fully understand the cyber risk exposure of your digital footprint. It is necessary to manage your digital footprint by:

• Being particularly careful about publicly sharing any personal information. Always think before you post online, including ‘what’ – the information you share online, ‘where’ – the platforms where you share the information and ‘who’ – the people you share information with.
• Enabling the privacy settings on your social media accounts.
• Disabling or deleting your old or inactive accounts.
• Asking your immediate family members to do the things mentioned above.

[Disclaimer: this article is my personal thoughts and do not necessarily represent PwC positions or opinions.]