Online Safety: Are bots in your twitter following?

Yesterday I had a an interesting sequence of events happen within my Twitter footprint that I had not seen previously. I had 11+ new followers, all who had over 100, some over 1000 followers. These new followers all arrived in my follower list in sequence over the course of the early morning. Each of these *individuals* had sent between 2-10 tweets, none of which were original content – all of them being RT (re-tweets) of pieces from trusted sources such as Mashable.

The Twitter handle/name had the format of “given name” + “3 to 5 random characters”. Click on the Figure-1 o the left to see all of these names which arrived in my follower list and you’ll understand the naming convention. Every single one of these names is a “bot” generated name.

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Our Family Is Our Responsibility

I recently spoke at an event in Seattle on the security aspects of Social Media, both from the business and personal perspective.  One question which I fielded surrounded whether or not there is risk to children via the various social media networks (i.e., Facebook) or should one accept that if someone really wants to hurt my family they don’t need …