solutions sECuRitY
I Stole My Friend’s Online Identity Even if you haven’t yet jumped on the social-networking bandwagon, you’re not safe. Here’s how to keep someone from creating an account in your name. By Matthew D. Sarrel
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’m sure we’re all familiar with Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 tale The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It centers on a series of odd occurrences involving the kind and responsible Dr. Henry Jekyll and his hidden side, the morally bereft Mr. Edward Hyde. Anyone wanting to bring out his evil side can easily do so online. Remember, on the Internet no one knows you’re a dog; you can be whoever you wish. Isn’t that fun? Flip over the coin and it might no longer be fun for you. If you can be whoever you wish, then so can everyone else. Everyone can be anyone and do anything—isn’t that why we love the Web so much? I’ve written a lot about the problem of identity theft—the kind in which your financial identity in the real world gets stolen— but this time I’m talking about protecting your online identity. Your fragile and public online identity is protected haphazardly at best. Web 2.0’s collaborative nature and social networking’s ease of access have seen to that. Compromising these accounts is a 86 PC MAGAZinE DiGitAl EDition JUNE 2009
fairly trivial feat. A criminal could break into your account and misrepresent your online persona, damaging your reputation, exploiting the trust relationships with your friends and colleagues, and leaving you to wake up in the morning as Dr. Jekyll did—with a big mess of unknown origin to clean up. no Hacking necessary Guess what? It’s even easier if you don’t yet have an online identity. A person doesn’t need to hack your existing account and can just set up a fraudulent one to begin with. This ought to light a fire under you to create those profiles, if only to lock them down. Fifteen years ago the threat was domain squatting; now the threat is social squatting. If you’ve never signed up for sites like Blogspot, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and Twitter, then it’s disturbingly easy for a miscreant to do so for you. And then there’s no telling what kind of other, more malicious activities your co-opted identity can serve as a jumping-off spot for. To demonstrate how easy it is to take
