Certified Social Media Hacker

Recently, an article came to my attention about social networks being gamed in order to hurt the reputations of competitors and enemies.

With all the talk these days of search engine optimization, social media experts, and the “internet of things” we are looking to connect our information to as many people, and in as many ways, as possible. Have you considered the ways this might hurt you instead?

We are beginning to get a handle, as a society, on the minimum viable security that every organization needs in order to stay in business and not be destroyed by the constant noise of attacks facing us on the Internet.

But what happens when instead of facing a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack, you face a distributed denial of social media (DDOSM) attack? When your enemies create tens of thousands of fake Twitter followers to overwhelm your social media team and distract them from the actual input of your customers?

What would happen if a thousand negative Yelp reviews, or Amazon.com reviews plagued your products or your place of business?

I’m not even talking about the well publicized cases of Twitter accounts being hacked causing a momentary shift of billions of dollars in the money markets or the founder of Facebook finding links he didn’t post appearing in his feed. Those are typical attacks, whether social engineering to obtain someone’s password, or exploiting a bug in software to take advantage of the situation. Those attacks are generally, and quite simply, illegal.

Social media attacks, on the other hand, play by the rules that we’ve set. They use the connections between the followers and the followed to infect the mindset of many.

Social media and mindshare are a new type of currency that is being traded every day. What are you doing to protect yours?