Every time you leave a comment about yourself on a public social website,you're unknowingly giving ammunition to data harvesters and hackers（黑客）looking to gain a backdoor into your online accounts.
The social network is absolutely littered with seemingly harmless posts asking users to comment and share-what was the name of your first pet? what was the name of the street you grew up on?-and it's not uncommon to see that thousands of people have obliged.But a lot of these personal details are the same as those used by sites when you need to reset your password or prove your identity.
Since there are so many pages online that do nothing but pose these sorts of questions and spread the posts as wide as possible, would-be attackers just need to follow along and harvest the data.Even worse,by commenting on such a post you're flagging that you're not opposed to giving this kind of historical information away，and an attacker could click（点击） through to your public profile and collect an entire store of security question answers,along with potentially your full name,date of birth and email address.
"It seems pretty clear that criminals are indeedI harvesting such information from social website,"said security researcher Brian Krebs.“Why wouldn't they? It's free, and people self-select for targeting.”
Mr.Krebs said it's not necessarily true that the pages themselves are run by people who want to use your data for their own purposes. It just so happens that asking people to express something about themselves is one of the best ways to collect big numbers of comments. “Probably most of these are started by well-meaning companies and individuals," he said. “Unfortunately,when people respond truthfully it opens them to fraud because their responses remain tied to their own profiles."
At a time when passwords are broken by algorithms（计算程序）and users are encouraged to use password managers to create complex and unique passwords for each account,security questions are a weak link.By giving data away on the public internet you're only making the hacker's job easier. Mr.Krebs said social websites aren't necessarily doing anything wrong by allowing posts that ask for personal information,and he doesn't expect the social network to do anything about them.“A better response is for these posts to be flooded with comments from people stating how bad an idea it is to respond truthfully," he said.
What does the author imply about the people willing to answer personal questions online?