It began as a seemingly harmless social media trend: people posting their old high school yearbook photos as a show of support for the class of 2020, whose proms and graduations have been canceled or postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
But the Better Business Bureau and cybersecurity experts are warning that the information people provide with those photos can be used by hackers to steal people’s identities.
“I’d like to think that this was created as a genuinely good cause,” said Paula Fleming, chief marketing and sales officer for the Better Business Bureau serving Eastern Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont. “It’s also a fun thing that lets people connect with friends while they have to stay home. Unfortunately, though, whenever there’s a crisis of almost any kind, scam artists come out of the woodwork.”
The BBB already has received calls from people throughout North America, reporting that the information they posted with their yearbook photo on Facebook or Twitter led or may have led to identity theft, Fleming said.
The name of the high school you attended and the year you graduated are answers to common security questions hackers can use to gain access to your bank account and credit cards. All it takes is an internet search to find out even more about you, such as family members, your date of birth and where you live.
“People don’t realize how much they may be damaging themselves by providing that kind of information,” said Anthony Townsend, professor of information systems at Iowa State University. “There would be enough there to encourage some malicious person to try to cozy up to you and try to extract even more information from you.”
To protect themselves, people should limit access to what they post on their social media accounts through their privacy settings, said Anthony Roman, president of Roman and Associates, a New York City-based investigation and risk-management firm.
People with a low tolerance for risk should allow only people they trust to view their posts and should not allow search engines to link to their profile, Roman said.
“The more you have at risk, the more careful you have to be because hackers due comb the web and will build a data profile on people,” he said, “and if they secure enough information, they can package it and sell it or try to frighten you into paying them.”
