The Badge Archive

Fulfills Step 3 of GSUSA Cadette Cybersecurity Investigator badge requirements.

Info Needed for badge requirements:

1. How Hackers Use Social Media:
   • Hackers can find personal information from posts or profiles, like your name or where you live.
   • They might use fake profiles to send friend requests and trick you into sharing private details.
   • Posting about trips or plans can let hackers know when you’re not home.
2. Three Ways to Stay Safe:
   • Avoid Oversharing: Be cautious about posting personal details like full names, addresses, or plans (e.g., vacations).
   • Keep Profiles Private: Only allow friends or followers you know in real life to view your posts and information.
   • Never Accept Friend Requests from Strangers: Even if the profile looks real, don’t accept requests from people you don’t know personally.

Items Needed

• VTK Social Media Profile by GSUSA for each group of 4-6 scouts.

Instructions

1. Introduce the Scenario: Emma and her family went on vacation for spring break. When they returned, they discovered their house had been robbed, and Emma’s laptop was stolen. Scouts will investigate Emma’s social media account to figure out what went wrong.
2. Divide scouts into groups of 4-6. Give each group a printed set of Emma’s Social Media Profile.
   • If there are more profiles than scouts, some scouts can analyze multiple profiles. If there are more scouts than profiles, pair them together to work on one profile.
3. Scouts carefully review Emma’s social media account to identify unsafe actions or mistakes. They circle anything that could have contributed to the robbery, such as oversharing personal information or posting vacation photos while away.
4. Groups compare notes and discuss what they found. Scouts use the clues to figure out how the robbery might have happened and what Emma could have done differently.

Answer for Leaders: Emma made several unsafe choices on her social media account. She included her home address in her profile and shared a photo from her vacation. This publicly let her followers know that her family was not at home, leaving their house vulnerable. One of her followers, “mayalovescoffee24,” was actually a criminal looking for such opportunities. Additionally, because Emma frequently posted pictures of monkeys, “mayalovescoffee24” was able to guess her computer password, which was related to monkeys.

What were some of the unsafe things Emma did?

• She posted her full name, home address, school name, phone number, and email address on her profile.
• She accepted friend requests from strangers.
• She shared vacation photos while she was out of town.
• She posted a picture of her driver’s license, which contained personal information.

Who do you think “mayalovescoffee24” really is?
There is no way to know who they truly are. Even if they claimed to be a teenage girl, there is no way to verify their identity.