Social networks are platforms widely used by both private users and companies. They are very present in our day-to-day life and are used to communicate with other users, give our opinion, share information, read news … There are very varied ones, as we know. However, the fact that they are so widely used also invites hackers to carry out their attacks. In this article we are going to talk about what are social media clones and how they can affect us.
The importance of social networks in our day to day
As we say, social networks are Internet services that have millions of users around the world. We are talking about platforms as popular as Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. They offer us a wide range of possibilities for our day to day. This makes them tools that are already part of our lives, that serve to communicate and be in contact with other users.
It should be noted that they are present in all types of devices and operating systems. We can make use of them through applications, but also through the web version. But all this also makes hackers use different types of methods and attacks to compromise the security and privacy of our profiles.
One of the problems is social media clones . Let’s see what it is and how it could endanger users.
What are social media clones
Social media clones are basically a copy of a legitimate profile . It means that someone has copied our Facebook account, Instagram or whatever platform it is and created another pretending to be ourselves. What they want is to make believe that behind that created account is the real user, when in reality it is not.
A person can create a profile pretending to be legitimate and add the same users as the real account. You can also take photos uploaded to that primary profile and upload them equal to the secondary one. Here we can even include the main profile photo. It is not something complex, since it would be enough to take a screenshot of those images.
In no time an intruder would have an account created with our name , our profile picture, as well as other images that we had uploaded. You can even create publications simulating those that we already had previously created. This, in case they add to our contacts, may not be too weird for them. That is, let’s say you add our friends with the same name, profile picture, etc. Those contacts might think that we have simply decided to create another account for some reason, but that you really are a legitimate user.
The problem is that, logically, behind that profile we are not ourselves, but there is a possible intruder whose objective is to impersonate our identity. This would allow you to contact other users on our behalf, access information from other profiles, etc.
As we can see, social media clones can be a significant problem for our privacy. It is something that could appear on the net.
How to avoid social media clones
Something important to avoid this is to make our accounts private . In this way we will prevent anyone from accessing our images, seeing the added contacts or the information in our profile. This will make the task difficult for intruders.
We should also try to verify our account in some way. For example, link it to our mobile or email address. Likewise, in the event that we detect a copy of our profile, we must report it as soon as possible to the social network. This will prevent you from adding other users on our behalf.
On the other hand, as additional security measures , we must always create passwords that are strong and complex. It is also important to activate two-step authentication to protect our accounts from possible improper access and that puts our security and privacy at risk.