Influencers, streamers and social media personalities will good cyber security in 2023. What is the best way to proceed?

1. Cyber security for influencers – Why people in public life
need to protect themselves from threats
Cyber security is a topic that, even in 2023, far too few individuals,
influencers and companies are addressing. Often, the problem is that the
added value of the expenditure is not seen and thus budget flows into
something that is considered “not mandatory” in the first instance. Looking
at a study conducted by KPMG in 2022, this approach is simply wrong. 67%
of the Austrian companies surveyed were victims of a cyberattack in the
last 12 months. This led to financial damage for some, which can also be
existentially threatening. Influencers are unfortunately not protected from
this and are equally affected as companies. But why are social media
personalities at risk and how can they effectively be protected?
Consider influencers as a normal
business
Influencers, or public figures in general, shouldn’t be viewed any
differently than a company. Because although it often seems like only one
person is acting, that’s usually only the case with nano and micro

2. influencers. All other groups usually have support in pretty much all areas,
as they simply have a too large follower base. If you compare a company
and their size with the amount of followers of an influencer, you can very
quickly see a correlation when it comes to the attack surface. The more
users follow, the more staff is needed and the risk increases. In addition to
this, there is also the generated interest. While a classic company,
individually considered, is not in the public eye, they are more likely to be
selected by hackers based on sales/profit or by accident. While this is also
true for public figures, individual individuals might additionally have a
personal interest. This poses great dangers, because it is still possible to
infiltrate any system. The only question is how great the interest is and how
much time it takes.
Major impact
What happens in a cyber attack on a traditional company is seen every
day. But you can also find enough information about influencers, streamers
and general social media personalities. For example, in April 2022,
the Youtuber Julien Bam was successfully hacked and his YouTube and
Instagram channels were taken over. The consequences in this case? The
sustained loss of followers, a significant loss of trust and financial damage.
None of this would have been necessary, considering the attack path. At
that time, it seems that a classic phishing email was responsible for the
infection of a single PC. Any password or authentication with MFA, no
matter how strong, is irrelevant here because the user was already logged
on to the PC. But a simple EDR solution with monitoring, for around 150€ a
year, could have prevented this. To expand this, we would also
suggest phishing tests with suitable software to sufficiently sensibilize the
employees.
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