Despite of being one of the biggest time waster of my life, I still love Facebook. It’s one of the best medium to connect to all my friends with a feeling of Social. It’s true, now I don’t have to ask my friend what are they up to, because their status updates keep me updated. (Pun intended). Anyhow, by the end Facebook is the best medium to stay connected and updated and if it’s taking too much to your time, than you can deactivate Facebook account for few days like CTO of Twitpic and see what difference does it make for you.
Anyhow, being world’s most popular Social network, Fb is always targeted by spammer and hackers. And, it’s our job to make sure to secure Facebook account from hackers.
That not only include passwords, but also application access too. As many spam Facebook application will send out request to all your friends and do many suspicious activities on your account. How many times you have seen your friend posted about Candid photo or video, which leads to some web page full or ads and spam. I”m sure you will never like to put youself into such situation and this guide to secure Facebook account will help you to prevent losing your Fb account.
Before we move ahead, I suggest you to read about Phishing, Malware and How do hackers hack, this will give you a better idea about how you are most likely to lose your Facebook access by a spammer. At the time of writing Facebook is most popular social networking website. I’m sure many of you who are reading this, must be spending hours of time everyday on Facebook.
5 tips to Secure Facebook account:
First thing first, you should refer to Facebook security guidelines first, which will help make first few changes to increase the security of your account. Now, we will start with other things we can do and stuff, we need to take care of:
Enable Facebook secure browsing login:
Secure browsing or Https browsing helps you to avoid some of the common method of hacking like password sniffing and also all the data transmitted between your computer and Facebook will be encrypted. All major e-commerce and Email sites uses the same technology. To enable secure browsing, go to Facebook > Account Settings > Security and click on secure browsing and enable it.
Recently Facebook brought HTTPS enabled login and this is first step to your Facebook account security. To enable this feature, go to edit account settings and under account security enable secure browsing.
Facebook Login notification:
This is one of the best feature which will make sure that you will get notified whenever your account is compromised. When ever your account will be logged in from a new device, you will be receiving an Email for the same. To enable this feature, go to account settings > Account security and enable features which says “When a new computer or mobile device logs into this account”.
Also, when ever you are login in from a known device, give it a meaning-ful name, which will help you to identify the system in future.
Use Strong and complex password:
One simple way to get into someone account is by using hit and trial method for password. Brute forcing is usually useless these days because of complex security measures taken by Facebook. But if I know you as an individual, I may try to try couple of passwords like your Girlfriend name, your birth date and so on. Most of the time this works. If you wish to be secure your Facebook account or other services, you should try using a complex password. More over by changing your password every month and using different password for different account will surely help. You might like to read my earlier article on How to create a strong password.
Keeping your computer secure:
If you have read earlier article on How do hackers hack your password, you will have an idea that first place which will be targeted is your computer. We have already shared how to keep yourself safe and secure while surfing internet. But let me repeat myself once again, you should be keeping your OS up to date along with Antivirus. If you are tech savvy, I would recommend using any firewall (Comodo is one which I use and recommend) and a Trojan remover. (Try Trojan remover).
Avoid Facebook spam applications:
If you are active user on Facebook, you must have seen spam in the form of Facebook applications like Mark Zuckerberg official announcement and so on. Try not to use any Facebook application if you have not read it’s review. These days most of such spam applications will spam your friend wall, will ask you to fill a survey or else they will add random people into your account. You can go to application setting page and see which all applications have access to your Facebook account. Disable those which you are not using.
If you have any more tips which will help us to secure Facebook account, do let us know via comments. If you like the above tips, don’t forget to share it on Facebook and join us on Facebook for more such updates.