Photographers, video editors, bloggers, influencers, and many other creators rely heavily on the internet for their work and income. With that, they become a prime target for threat actors who may look to duplicate their work, gain access to their online accounts, or steal valuable information.
To know how to protect themselves, creators need to be aware of some of the major threats they have to face. This article will list five cybersecurity threats for creators and suggest ways to mitigate them.
1. Compromised Account Login Credentials
Creators like social media influencers or bloggers usually use many different platforms and have many different online accounts for their work. If someone else gains access to these accounts, they can inflict serious damage on the creator’s reputation or financials.
The number one reason for account breaches is the use of weak passwords. As online professionals, creators have to take the security of their accounts very seriously. This starts with setting up strong passwords.
With that said, some creators may use a handful of accounts every day to do their work. Setting up strong and hard-to-remember passwords for each of them may prove to be challenging. But if you continue to use weak passwords, it’s just a matter of time before they’re breached. If you struggle a lot to remember your passwords, a special password manager can help keep your credentials in check.
2. Social Engineering Attacks
Social engineering attacks use psychological manipulation to prompt users to make seemingly obvious mistakes to reveal sensitive information. Creators are very cyber-aware, as they spend most of their work time online. Yet, they are just as prone to making innocent mistakes like clicking on unsafe links or downloading malicious files.
Due to their publicly-available information such as email, phone number, and portfolio, threat actors tend to target creators en-masse, hoping they make a careless mistake.
The most common social engineering attack is phishing. Phishing involves messages where hackers are pretending to be someone they’re not. The goal is to infect the victim with hidden malware or get them to enter sensitive information such as login credentials.
With creators, hackers may pretend that they’re a customer and send the victim a malicious link containing malware.
To protect themselves, creators can:
- Reject requests for help from unverified sources
- Set spam filter to ‘high’
- Avoid clicking or downloading anything that looks remotely suspicious
3. Mobile Security Threats
Most creators are constantly using their mobile phones to create content. Thus, they have to know how to protect their device to prevent cybersecurity risks.
The most common cybersecurity concerns associated with mobile phones are:
Using public WiFi
No authentication security measures
Physical loss or theft
Creators should avoid using public WiFi or use a VPN when doing so. They should also use a passcode to unlock their phone or use facial or fingerprint recognition.
4. Cloud Security Threats
Creators have grown accustomed to storing and sharing data through the cloud. There is certainly nothing wrong with that, but creators should also be aware that there are dangers out there, and they should know how to protect themselves against them. It’s true that most reputable cloud services have advanced security measures in place to prevent attacks. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always guarantee security.
Perhaps the greatest cybersecurity risk with the cloud is misconfiguration. If creators are new to a platform, they might accidentally misconfigure the settings and allow unauthorized access to critical data.
Some other risks include:
- API vulnerabilities – where flaws in the system’s API (application programming interface) can allow hackers to access data or launch DDoS (denial of service) attacks.
- Data loss – can occur due to a large amount of data sharing or failure to create backups.
- Malware – as data travels through the cloud, it’s also easy for malware to infect many files and spread across different users.
To protect their cloud data, creators should encrypt it and look to create physical backups (on a hard drive or flash drive).
5. Ransomware Attacks
Ransomware is a type of malware (malicious software) that threatens to expose your data if you don’t pay the attackers. The software is installed on your device after the attackers have breached it and gained access to valuable information they can use to demand ransom.
Ransomware is a growing threat, with thousands of new variants each year and nearly 100% yearly growth in paid ransom.
Whether they’re working alone or with a team, creators are still regarded as a business. Hackers know that there is much to gain if they get access to their data.
To protect themselves against ransomware, creators should:
- Encrypt all valuable data and back it up regularly.
- Regularly patch their OS and all software they use.
- Enable security features in apps and systems.
- Install antivirus and anti-malware software.
Final Thoughts
Creators like bloggers, photographers, influencers, and others, rely heavily (sometimes solely) on the internet for their income. Thus, they face a number of cybersecurity challenges that they have to be aware of. Thankfully, by being careful, remaining educated on the latest threats, and implementing security measures to prevent attacks, creators can significantly reduce the risk of cyberattacks.