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Why posting your vaccine card to social media is a bad idea

While the fact that so many South Africans are excited enough about vaccinations that they are posting proof of their vaccine card to social media, it does present some issues from a privacy perspective.

The trouble is posting your vaccine card to social media may be more risky than it’s worth.

“It’s a disappointing reality when you can’t even post a selfie of yourself with your vaccination card without fear of having that information stolen,” says Anna Collard, senior vice president of content strategy and evangelist at KnowBe4 Africa.

“The problem is that there are cybercriminals and tools out there designed to capture your personal information. From full names to ID numbers to other vital personal facts and stats, your personal details can put you and your identity at risk,” Collard adds.

What use would a cybercriminal have with your identity? Well for one it can be used to craft more believable phishing attacks. By using details that you might believe only your bank or another trusted entity would have access to, cybercriminals may be more successful in getting you to reveal even more information.

Furthermore, cybercriminals could prey on the fact that you are vaccinated in a bid to extract more information from victims.

“An email that knows you’ve just been vaccinated but preys on your fears around travel, or perhaps around side-effects, may ask you to use your healthcare insurance details to log into a fake website trying to capture more of your details,” explains Collard.

Cybercriminals don’t even need to manually capture your details as there are tools that allow this to happen automatically.

“Phishing is a profitable business, which makes it a sophisticated one,” says Collard.

“From personalised phishing emails, to social engineering, to fake emails pretending to be from your company, or a service provider, scammers are smart in their approaches, and succeeding in their attacks. With the information available on your vaccination card, someone can pretend to be from your HR department asking you to change your login details by following a link, and you’ll trust it because who doesn’t trust HR? It’s a complex world, so keep your information close to your chest and off the internet,” she adds.

If you are going to post a photo of your vaccination card be sure to block out any potentially important information. With that having been said, it’s probably best not to post it online at all. The clout just isn’t worth the risk.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]

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