The desire to appear at the top of a search engine results page gave birth to the entire practice of search engine optimization (SEO) beginning around 1991. Google's SEO guidelines soon became the de facto rules webmasters use to provide a “good user experience” to people searching for information. Unfortunately, some of those very same SEO guidelines are being used to poison Google search results and damage social media pages. Now, because social platforms have become such primary sources of information, hackers have shifted their attention to the users of social media and are using black hat SEO techniques to target users in yet another effort to deceive, damage and steal from people and companies.... Read more »

ABC News, Good Morning America, HBO, Senator Ted Cruz, Mark Zuckerburg, CEO's of Uber, Zendesk, Oculus, Spotify, Twitter and dozens of C-suite executives along with now-deceased Beatle George Harrison and NASA's Kepler space telescope. What do these people, companies, top executives and space telescopes have in common? They've all had their Twitter accounts hacked. [1]... Read more »

Social media has evolved how businesses and individuals communicate and although we are constantly being warned about the risks of social media, no one ever thinks a hack will actually happen to them, their family, or their company. Yet, every day it seems that another company’s social network has been hacked. Three recent social media hacks involved the Facebook and Twitter accounts of Newsweek Magazine, Delta Airlines, and one of Twitter’s top executives. These hacks included threats to President Obama and his family, objectionable sexual content, and hundreds of twitter direct messages containing spam links.... Read more »

A good reputation complete with trust from customers is one of the hardest things for a business to earn but it is also one of the easiest to lose. Through recent data breaches we have seen companies such as Target and Anthem quickly lose customer trust and suffer damage to their company value as a request of a cyber-attack. While social media is an extremely valuable tool for marketing and sales it also creates an opportunity for the company to get hacked and cause potentially unrepairable damage.... Read more »