Tag Archives: Social Networking

Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

High Profile Instagram Accounts Being Held For Ransom By Hackers

Hackers have recently hit upon a new money-making scheme.  Some groups have started breaking into Instagram accounts belonging to people with high numbers of followers.

They are then holding those accounts hostage until the owner agrees to pay the ransom.  In some cases, the hackers are charging as much as $40,000 USD to return an account back to its user.

They’re gaining control of the accounts initially via some clever social engineering. The attack begins when the hackers contact the Instagram user claiming copyright infringement.

The email they send contains a link that takes the victim to a website the hackers control.  The user is prompted to enter their Instagram account information (username and password) which of course is harvested by the hackers.

Once they have that they log in and immediately change the victim’s password.

They then modify the account profile so that it includes the phrase:

”this Instagram account is held to be sold back to its owner,” followed by a contact link.

Clicking the contact link opens a WhatsApp chat session where the hackers make the ransom demands and wait.  If the victim doesn’t initiate contact via the profile link, the hackers will start sending text messages to the phone number associated with the account.  Either way, the negotiation process begins

Security researchers who have begun investigating the scam have concluded that at least one of the threat actors involved is based in Turkey.

At this point, there is no reliable information about how many Instagram attacks have been compromised in this manner. There also isn’t any information about how much money the hackers have made in total via this approach. If you are an Instagram user and you have an impressive number of followers it pays to at least be aware of the possibility.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

WhatsApp Now Provides Disappearing Messages Feature To Improve Security

Whatsapp has had a tough year from a security standpoint and has suffered losses in the size of its user base as a result.

To their credit, the company has been working hard to make their product more secure.

Recently they took another powerful step in that direction with the introduction of disappearing messages. These allow you to set a time delay that will cause your conversations with other users to have a pre-defined shelf life of either 24 hours or 90 days at your option.

This builds on the disappearing messages feature the company introduced last year which allowed users or admins to set messages to disappear after seven days.

The company had this to say about the recent changes:

“When enabled, all new one-on-one chats you or another person start will be set to disappear at your chosen duration, and we’ve added a new option when creating a group chat that lets you turn it on for groups you create.  This new feature is optional and does not change or delete any of your existing chats.

For people who choose to switch on default disappearing messages, we will display a message in your chats that tells people this is the default you’ve chosen.

This makes clear it’s nothing personal – it’s a choice you’ve made about how you want to communicate with everyone on WhatsApp moving forward.

We believe disappearing messages along with end-to-end encryption are two crucial features that define what it means to be a private messaging service today, and bring us one step closer to the feeling of an in-personal conversation.”

These are good changes and they do indeed serve to mitigate the risks of Whatsapp users.  Kudos to the company for continuing to improve their product and make it more secure.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Twitter Increasing Privacy With Stricter Picture And Media Sharing

Recently Twitter’s CEO stepped down. Since then, the company has been gearing up to make some changes that many of the industry’s insiders regard as long overdue.

The first of these changes has now been rolled out with the company modifying its privacy policy and outlining new rules related to the sharing of pictures and videos. The company explained the change and the rationale behind it in a recent blog post.

Their recent blog post reads in part as follows:

“Sharing personal media, such as images or videos, can potentially violate a person’s privacy, and may lead to emotional or physical harm.

The misuse of private media can affect everyone, but can have a disproportionate effect on women, activists, dissidents, and members of minority communities. When we receive a report that a Tweet contains unauthorized private media, we will now take action in line with our range of enforcement options.”

The company does understand that sometimes users may share photos and/or videos in a bid to help a third party in a crisis and their new policy does include some provisions to try and assess those on a case-by-case basis.

In the same blog post the company had this to say about cases like that:

“In such cases, we may allow the images or videos to remain on the service.

For instance, we would take into consideration whether the image is publicly available and/or is being covered by mainstream/traditional media (newspapers, TV channels, online news sites), or if a particular image and the accompanying tweet text adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in public interest or is relevant to the community.”

These are good changes overall. It will be interesting to see the early results of the company’s case-by-case assessment where those exceptions are concerned. In any case kudos to Twitter for taking some important steps in the right direction.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

YouTube Will Start Hiding Dislike Counts From Public

Some months back YouTube announced that it would begin experimenting with the notion of hiding the number of down votes or dislikes that displayed content receives.

At present for most of the content on the platform the number of “thumbs down” votes is displayed alongside the number of “thumbs up” votes that a given video receives.

Having experimented with it for a while now the company has decided to proceed. So you’ll notice a growing percentage of content available that only shows the number of “thumbs up” it gets. Content creators will still be able to see the number of “thumbs down” votes on the back end but those numbers will no longer be available for public consumption.

According to various statements the company has made along the way the goal here is to cut off a potential vector for harassment. Based on the comments found in many videos a significant percentage of users left message saying something to the effect of “I just came here to leave a dislike.”

While there’s merit in the company’s thinking it hides a slightly more selfish purpose as well. In all of YouTube history the single most disliked video is the company’s own “Rewind from 2018” video. In fact that video earned so much negative press that the company has since opted to cancel their Rewind videos altogether.

YouTube is certainly not the first company to make the decision to hide negative rating metrics. Twitter for example allows users to hide the number of likes a tweet gets at the poster’s option.

No matter what your opinion is it is important to stress that as a content creator you’ll still have access to that information. The hope is simply that it won’t be used by viewers to create a negative feedback loop.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Twitter Will No Longer Auto-Crop Photos On The Web

Twitter hasn’t had a very good relationship with auto-cropping. Images just haven’t historically displayed very well on the platform.

Fortunately that is soon changing. The company recently announced that it is dropping crop on the web altogether on both its Android and iOS apps.

It may seem like a small change but Twitter’s auto-cropping algorithm was at the heart of a controversy last year. That was when it was pointed out that there was evidence that the company’s auto-cropping algorithm favored white faces over black faces resulting in black faces getting cut out and white faces displayed more prominent.

Research into the issue revealed a minor bias but the issue wasn’t as serious as was being described. The company nonetheless decided to disable the feature and now it seems that it’s going away for good.

The coolest aspect of the change is that rather than getting a clumsily cropped image preview of your tweet viewers will get to see the entire image. That matters especially if you’re in the habit of posting memes which often lose much of their punch and impact if you can’t see the whole thing. Worse is that relatively fewer people are likely to click on your tweet to see the complete image if it’s cropped in such a way that it’s hard to tell what it is.

We applaud Twitter’s decision here. They weren’t very good at auto-cropping anyway. Abandoning the feature makes the platform richer and more interesting. That’s the kind of thing that attracts users and advertising dollars. So kudos to Twitter all around.

It’s also great from a marketing perspective. So if your business leverages the power of Twitter there’s even more to smile about. You won’t have to worry that your image heavy advertisements and branding tweets are getting cropped in inconvenient ways.

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