What is egosurfing and how to practice it in my company

When it comes to our privacy, every precaution is a small one. Keeping our data safe on the Internet is essential in these times, both for citizens and companies. In our blog, we talk about different practices that help us take care of one of our company’s most important assets: information.

On this occasion, we will learn about a technique that, despite not being very popular, many of us have practic without knowing it: egosurfing .

You may have wonder at some point what comes up when you search for your name on the Internet, and you were probably curious at that moment and did just that. Well, that’s what egosurfing is all about.

The word egosurfing comes from the

Latin word ego, meaning “I”, meaning “oneself”, and the English word “surf” meaning “surfing the Internet”. This practice, in addition to satisfying the most curious Internet users, is highly recommend for the security of our data. And, as we already know, it is very important to know and protect the information about us on the Internet and, in some cases, to clean up our digital footprint.

The term egosurfing is aim at people who carry out this practice, that of searching for their own personal data on the Internet: name, surname, ID, registration number, but we can also apply it to our company, not only to control its online identity, but also to protect its reputation or information that should not be public, and that is what we are going to see in this blog.

How can we do egosurfing in our company?

There are several ways to practice it, all of them very simple and accessible to anyone:

1. Browser search
Whatever browser we use (Google Chrome, Safari, ge, Firefox…), or by accessing the most common search engines (Google, Bing…), we can directly write the name of our company in quotation marks (or the data we are interest in recent works searching for) and click on search to see what appears on the Internet. Including the quotation marks makes the search more specific and focuses only on the parameters in quotation marks.

Search for name in quotes

 

 

Search for INCIBE name in search engine –

It is not enough to just stay on the first pages of results; it is also necessary to investigate and analyze the other sections: images, videos, news…

INCIBE search result

– INCIBE name search result –

It is advisable to focus not only on the name of the company, but on other data that also belong to us and identify us , such as the postal როგორ მოვახდინოთ ციფრული ტრანსფორმაცია სამთო და ლითონების ინდუსტრიაში? address, telephone number, our corporate emails or the CIF.

2. Google Alerts
This tool allows us to pre-configure the arrival of notifications every time a publication is made with the search parameters we have mark. In this case, we could choose the data of our organization that we mention before and select to which email and how often we want the alerts to arrive.

Create INCIBE alert on Google

– Creating alerts –

3. Social networks
In this case, the strategy is very similar to that of the search engine. By typing the name of our company in the social mia search engine adb directory we can find what has been publish about it.

It is important to do this on all social networks, whether or not we have an account, since fake profiles could appear that publish content in our name.

For this reason, it is also a good practice to try different combinations of the name of our business. That is, if our company was call, for example, <<Mil y un libros>>, and our profile on the social network we use is @milyunlibros, we could do searches like: @mily1libros, @miilyunlibros, @milyunIibro or @milyunlibros . You probably haven’t notic the difference in the latter, but the <<l>> in libros has been replac by a capital <<i>>, making the difference practically unnoticeable . In this way, cybercriminals deceive our customers by impersonating us, stealing our identity , asking for personal information in our name or making them fall for phishing (pretending, for example, that they have won a raffle), thus discriting the name of our company.