How to save Facebook account from Hacking | All Open Source

Wednesday, 25 December 2013

How to save Facebook account from Hacking

If you are an internet user, then most probably you are a Facebook user too. Using facebook is fun and useful too – we can keep in touch with our friends, find old friends, find new friends, play games, chat with friends etc. But always remember – if popularity attracts good people, it surely attracts bad ones too – everyday there are a lot of facebook user accounts hacking attempts taking place all over the world. These hacking attempts aim at hacking user accounts then stealing their personal photos and other confidential data, and then misusing that stolen information. The Facebook website itself is very strongly secured however the user accounts of facebook are not that secure if the users don’t follow some basic rules. Today, we are going to talk about how to save your facebook account from hacking. There may be many ways to hack facebook accounts (I do not know about them myself as I am not a hacker and the purpose of this article if to make you aware and not train you on hacking) but there is one way which is most commonly used by hackers to hack facebook accounts i.e. by sending a fake email. If you are a facebook user and you have enabled email notifications, then you must be getting emails from facebook as notifications of a lot of activities e.g. new friend requests, new messages etc. The hackers use this as an opportunity and they send a fake email i.e. the email will appear as if it has been sent from facebook however it is sent by the hacker. It is STRONGLY ADVISED that you DO NOT OPEN an unknown email if you are in doubt (even if it seems to have been sent from your friends or known ones) and DO NOT CLICK on any link in any such email as clicking on such links will not take you to facebook but will take you to hacker’s website specifically designed for hacking, and you might find you id hacked !
To sum it up, just keep the following in mind to secure your facebook account from hackers:

  1. Be sure that your account password must be upto atleast 20 letters including alphabets(both lower and upper case), numbers and special characters.
  2. Do not click on any suspicious link in your email inbox to login to your facebook. Goto the address bar of your internet browser and type the facebook website address manually.
  3. Facebook Apps: Oh Apps! We all love those because they are so simple to handle, they give us so much information, they are helpful, they make us laugh, they help us pass our time so well but wait….do you know untrusted facebook apps can be a potential security threat? Yes, you heard me right, they can lead you to the loss of your facebook account. Of course, we cannot stop using apps for various uses but then we must be careful while selecting which apps we should activate because many apps can get access to your personal data on your facebook profile, and if you might have noticed – before installing any app in facebook, you get a prompt for giving permissions to your profile data, and then you allow it to access that. Remember, these apps are actually codes and hackers can use it to hack your account.
  4. Do not click on any suspicious looking link which are mostly in the form of a thumbnail of an interesting video that has a very catchy title. Those can be spam links which might even post junk things in your facebook wall and leave you embarrassed.
  5. Enable secure browsing in settings.
  6. Use Login Approvals feature of Facebook which help you to restrict access to anyone but you. Go ahead and explore it, its really worth it.

Enable SSL Settings for your Facebook account to be safe from Firesheep

In late of 2010, Codebutler, a developer released a Firefox add-on, named as Firesheep to use the security cookies for login verification of websites. You should be careful about this as the add-on has a security flaw with Wi-Fi network. Hackers can use this add-on to grab your login cookies trapping in the wireless network. So you must use SSL connection (https) when accessing your Facebook account in a Wi-Fi network connection. Learn how to enable SSL for Facebook.
In order to enable SSL login to your Facebook account and click on the Account link at the top-right corner of the page. Then click on Account settings link in the drop down menu.
Under the Settings tab scroll down to the Account security row and click on the Change link.
change-facebook-account-security
Click on the Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible check box and then Save button.
facebook-enable-account-security
Now whenever you will browse Facebook it will use the SSL (https) connection protocol.

If you find this helpful, give me feedback.


2 comments :