Online Security for Business: What Marketers Need to Know

Is your online identity secure?

Are you concerned about hackers?

To discover how to secure your social profiles, your online accounts and your identity from hackers, I interview Chalene Johnson and Darren Natoni.
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The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Chalene Johnson and Darren Natoni. Chalene is a fitness celebrity, author of the book Push and has large followings on Instagram and Facebook. She's also someone whose online identity was hijacked and sold to the highest bidder. Darren is a former special agent with the DEA who specializes in online security. He's also the chief technology officer for Shaun T, a fitness celebrity with millions of followers.

Chalene and Darren will explore what marketers and entrepreneurs need to know when it comes to securing their online accounts and more.

You'll discover how to be safe online and protect your identity from hackers.

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Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Online Security for Business
When Chalene got hacked

Chalene explains how she was enjoying a perfect day (a fact that she even tweeted out), when she got hacked. Someone changed her bio and had been tweeting at the same time she was tweeting. So Chalene changed her password to something out of the ordinary, logged back in and changed her bio.

Then, it happened again. The hackers were sending out porn and tweeting other people at the same time Chalene was on Twitter. Her other accounts were hacked as well. She felt like she wasn't safe in her own home. Even though it was an Internet attack and there wasn't a physical threat, Chalene recalls that it felt like it.

Darren shares where he was on the night of Chalene's cyberattack. He and his wife just got home from dinner and were flipping through Instagram when they noticed that Chalene's account had content she normally wouldn't post. So he texted her and said he thought she'd been hacked. She wrote back that she knew and was freaking out. He said to call him so they could get it under control and get the hackers out of her system.

By the time Chalene called Darren, her Twitter, Instagram and Facebook had been taken over. And, though she didn't realize it yet, the hackers were also in her inbox.

Chalene and Darren spent eight hours, working through the night, trying to patch everything up.

People assume it's personal, Chalene says, but that's not the case. It hit her especially hard because social media is her livelihood. The hackers deleted everything she posted on Instagram over the last four and a half years, and they started posting videos of animal cruelty and violent porn. Chalene felt helpless and responsible. The cost of the hack, which included security experts, loss of wages and rebuilding her security, was in excess of $200,000.

Darren says hacking is a sport for some people and a hobby for others. They are experts in their field. Since they don't have legal ways to demonstrate their expertise, this is how they do it.

Don't worry about hackers, Darren suggests. Focus on what you need to do to protect yourself. Situations like this expose holes that we knew existed, and that we should have patched, but kept putting it off. It's like waiting until a health condition pops up and then deciding to get in shape. Sometimes it takes an unfortunate disaster to get someone to appreciate the value of simple preventive measures.

Listen to the show to hear how engaging with the hackers made things worse for Chalene.

What defenses to put in place

Darren says to protect yourself,