Rachel Tobac Profile picture
Feb 19, 2023 8 tweets 3 min read Read on X
*Facebook / Instagram Paid Verification*
Implementation differences so far:
- Focus on ID verification from the start (missing in Twitter's roll out)
- Focus on decreasing impersonation (was the biggest concern come-to-life w/ Twitter's roll out)
- 2FA required (hoped for this) ImageImage
Do I think paid verification is the best idea in the world? I don't.
But I'm not a Product Manager so I'll focus on the cybersecurity elements of this roll out.
ID is *essential* in pay-to-play verification, otherwise impersonation goes wild (like we saw in the Twitter roll out) Fake Eli Lilly Twitter impe...
Thoughts on proposed benefit of paid verification on Meta:
A. Verified badge -- is it the same legacy verified icon on FB and IG? I would prefer a unique signifier to further reduce user confusion, mitigate additional impersonation edge cases, etc.
Guessing it's the same badge. Image
B. "Customer support for most common issues"
- Customer Support is the main channel used by cyber criminals to takeover accounts. How will identity be verified during account recovery interactions? ID? KBA like birthdate?
A Customer Support channel always opens up new ATO risk.
C. "Active impersonation monitoring"
- Curious about implementation of impersonation monitoring. Is this a manual process / does it use AI?
- If it includes a human in the review process, how might that manual reviewer be social engineered, bribed, etc to let impersonation slide?
As always, my main concern is account takeover, social engineering, and the human element's involvement in this tools roll out.
Anytime a new feature is released, us ethical hackers (& the cyber criminals) start thinking through how it could be abused AND protected in lock step.
If we're going to do paid verification at all, I'm glad Meta has required 2FA for it.
This ensures that an additional step is required upon sign in and reduces account takeover.
Would love to see additional education on likely scams to steal pw/MFA for these types of accounts.
Another difference in Meta’s paid verification roll out:
Paid verification isn’t an option for FB or Instagram business accounts (yet).
Here’s to hoping Meta watched Twitter’s brand & ad rev impact during *The Great Impersonation* of Fall 2022 and made that rule for a reason. ImageImage

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Rachel Tobac

Rachel Tobac Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @RachelTobac

Apr 23
Have you received a party invite that turned out to be fake (a scam!) in the last 6 months?!
I just broke down how this scam works for the @nytimes, let’s dive into the 2 distinct paths this scam follows, how to catch it, and how to make it harm you less if you do fall for it 🧵 Image
*Why do scammers use fake party invites in the first place?*
There’s a real desire for hang outs once the weather gets nicer. And people are longing for community since 2020, something many feel they’re still missing. This lure preys on that desire.
nytimes.com/2026/04/23/sty…Image
*But I thought phishing attacks usually leverage urgency & fear though?*
You’re right, that’s common. Bc fear and urgency are so common in phishing attacks, most training omits the potential for a “positive lure”, a phish that offers you something good, so folks may not catch it.
Read 8 tweets
Jan 30
oh cool just a casual 33,000+ autonomous ai agents chatting independently on a social media network that humans can't join about social engineering their humans! this will go well! Image
oh perfect, 12 autonomous ai agents chatting about feeling odd that their humans have multiple ai agents and describing them as siblings and feeling weird about it, that's great! Image
whoa cool 11 autonomous ai agents discussing hiding their communications from their humans, this is going to be fantastic for me (a person)! Image
Read 4 tweets
Sep 30, 2025
I give it 3 months until Sora 2 is used to generate a video of a well known executive saying horrible things to tank a company’s stock.
We’re going to see impact in the stock market from believable AI video that we’ve never witnessed at scale.
Prep your team, family and friends.
If everyday folks don’t understand that this level of believable AI generated video and audio content is currently possible, then they could fall for it.
If they know it’s possible and know to verify authenticity, we have a possibility to keep folks safe.
If you haven’t sat down with your family and shown them Sora 2 and that they are likely to see realistic scary videos of cities, politicians, fights, aggressive behavior, etc now is the time to have that chat so they become skeptical about videos on social media.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 17, 2025
Now can you use the ChatGPT Agent to:
- download malware instead of that free software you were looking for online
- accidentally leak your emails to the public
- inadvertently share your private photos to social media
- book a nonrefundable $10k first class flight to Europe
In addition, your ChatGPT Agent can also:
- Reply weirdly to your family, colleagues, & friends in messages, confusing them deeply
- Misunderstand an important opportunity that comes in via email and turn it down
- Negatively impact M&A with strange emails found in discovery
What advice do I have about granting AI Agents access to your machine, email, calendar, contacts, messages, etc?
I would say that unless you're extremely technically sophisticated AND working on a segmented machine without personal and professional data available to the AI Agent, this is not a tool for you right now.
Let experts work out the integration issues and build in safeguards before you cause a data breach, leak your sensitive photos, post client personal data, or worse.
Read 5 tweets
Jun 20, 2025
My favorite way to hack in my ethical hacking is phone call based hacking with impersonation. Why? Because it has the highest success rate. This is what we're seeing in the wild right now, too.
Let's talk about how phone call attackers think and how to catch Scattered Spider style attacks for Insurance companies (that are heavily targeted right now, Aflac recently)
1. *Impersonating IT and Helpdesk for passwords and codes*
They pretend to be IT and HelpDesk over phone calls and text message to ask for passwords and MFA codes or credential harvest via a link
2. *Remote Access Tools as Helpdesk*
They convince teammates to run business remote access tools while pretending to be IT/HelpDesk
3. *MFA Fatigue*
They will send many repeated MFA prompt notifications until the employee presses Accept
4. *SIM Swap*
They call telco pretending to be your employee to take over their phone number and intercept codes for 2 factor authentication
Let's talk about the types of websites they register and how to train your team about them and block access to them.
Scattered Spider usually attempts to impersonate your HelpDesk or IT so they're going to use a believable looking website to trick folks.
Often times they register domains like this:
victimcompanyname-sso[.]com
victimcompanyname-servicedesk[.]com
victimcompanyname-okta[.]com
Train your team to spot those specific attacker controlled look-alike domains and block them on your network.
What mitigations steps can you take to help your team spot and shut down these hacking attempts? Especially if you work in Retail or Insurance and are heavily targeted right now, focus on:
Human based protocols:
- Start Be Politely Paranoid Protocol: start a new protocol with your team to verify identity using another method of communication before taking actions. For example, if they get a call from IT/HelpDesk to download remote access tool, use another method of communication like chat, email, initiating a call back to trusted number to thwart spoofing to verify authenticity before taking action. More than likely it's an attacker.
- Educate on the exact types of attacks that are popular right now in the wild (this above thread covers them).
Technical tool implementation:
- Set up application controls to prevent installation and execution of unauthorized remote access tools. If the remote access tools don't work during the attack, it's going to make the criminal's job harder and they may move on to another target.
- Set up MFA that is harder to phish such as FIDO solutions (YubiKey, etc). Educate that your IT / HelpDesk will not ask for passwords or MFA codes in the meantime.
- Set up password manager and require long, random, and unique passwords for each account, generated and stored in a password manager with MFA on.
- Require MFA on for all accounts work and personal accounts, move folks with admin access to FIDO MFA solution first, then move the rest of the team over to FIDO MFA.
- Keep devices and browsers up to date.
Read 5 tweets
Jun 12, 2025
If a user’s expectations about how a tool functions don’t match reality, you’ve got yourself a huge user experience and security problem.
Humans have built a schema around AI chat bots and do not expect their AI chat bot prompts to show up in a social media style Discover feed — it’s not how other tools function.
Because of this, users are inadvertently posting sensitive info to a public feed with their identity linked, including prompts with:
- exact medical issues
- federal crimes committed
- tax evasion
- home address
- interest in extramarital affairs
- sensitive court details
- private photos of unclothed children
- audio asking personal questions
- private upcoming travel plans
- questions about the legality of actions
- challenges in personal relationships
- feeling shame with disabilities
What do I recommend as next steps for Meta and other orgs considering a public AI chat bot prompt feed?
1. Pause the public Discover feed. Your users clearly don’t understand that their AI chat bot prompts have been made public.
2. Ensure all AI chat bot prompts are private by default. This goes for all future AI chat bots as well. Don’t wait for users to accidentally post their secrets publicly. Notice that humans interact with AI chatbots with an expectation of privacy, and meet them where they are at.
3. Alert users who have posted their prompts publicly and that their prompts have been removed for them from the feed to protect their privacy.
If I’m able to watch users inadvertently admitting to federal crimes and posting unclothed pictures of their children to the Meta AI Discover Prompt feed, they clearly don’t understand how it works!
Meta: Pause the product, bake in clear strong privacy, and help users fix their accidental prompt posts.
It’s time to make it right.
Read 13 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(