Here's How the #Classof2020 Facebook Challenge Can Threaten Your Virtual Security
For years, graduating from school has been something to be celebrated. For students, it's a big thing that involves fancy suits and dresses, lots of selfies, and in some cases, stories that could form the plot for a teen movie. For parents, it's a proud moment and a reminder that time flies. Unfortunately, because of the current COVID-19 pandemic, many will miss this momentous occasion.
The coronavirus crisis means that many high-school graduates will have to wave goodbye to what adults refer to as the best years of their lives from the comfort of their homes. To contain the spread of the disease, schools have canceled proms and graduation celebrations, and you can probably guess how difficult this is for the students. People on the internet think that they know what could cheer them up.
Table of Contents
How was the #Classof2020 Facebook challenge born?
People from all over America are dusting off their old photo albums, plugging in their scanners, and logging into their Facebook accounts. It sounds like a recipe for disaster, but they are doing it for a good cause.
They want to show their moral support for today's graduates by sharing their own prom or graduation photos on Facebook. To turn the trend into a fad, each photo must be accompanied by the #Classof2020 hashtag, the high school from which the author graduated, and the year of graduation. The #Classof2020 Facebook challenge hasn't yet taken over the internet completely, but more and more people are sharing photos that feature hairstyles and fashion accessories, which the current generation might classify as questionable.
Apart from the comic value, we're not sure how this can help the heartbroken graduates, but the wave of old photos is a fact, and some experts are concerned about the privacy and security implications.
BBB warns about the potential problems caused by the #Classof2020 challenge
On Monday, Better Business Bureau (BBB) posted an alert on its website with which it encourages people to be a bit more careful with the old photos they share on social media. BBB warns that by participating in the #Classof2020 challenge, users are giving scammers quite a lot of useful information.
More specifically, they are sharing the school and the year in which they graduated, which, the BBB reckons, are often used as passwords or answers to secret questions. Is this a legitimate concern?
In a word, yes, it is. People do use passwords that are connected to their private lives in some way, and "Which school did you graduate from?" and "When did you graduate?" are common security questions. Some might argue that there are other ways of getting to this information, and this is indeed the case. That being said, cybercriminals prefer easy targets, and by tagging their private information with a popular hashtag, potential victims significantly reduce the level of difficulty for attackers.
The volume of data some people share on social media is huge, and experts have talked time and again about the potential problems with this. You can clearly see now how what appears to be a harmless internet challenge can result in account takeover attacks. The real issue is not the challenge itself, though.
The #Classof2020 challenge isn’t the real problem
The #Classof2020 challenge can indeed give hackers a readily available attack vector, but it won't be very useful if everyone takes their security more seriously. Users should realize that by picking passwords that are closely connected to their lives and personalities, they are making the hackers' job a lot easier even without the old prom photos. Meanwhile, service providers must finally understand that security questions are an incredibly insecure authentication mechanism.
