Malicious hackers are always in quest for vulnerable social media accounts. How about your personal information like pictures, messages, videos etc. being hijacked by an anonymous attacker? Terrible! Isn’t it? You can be a victim of social account breach if you do not take adequate steps to ensure your account’s security.
Here are 8 mistakes which make your social account hackable :
- Weak and Guessable Passwords: The most common passwords people use on social media sites are “password”,”123456”, etc. They are not worthy enough to protect you! Even passwords with other common words and phrases won’t work too, nor will your names or some of its variations. These can easily be deciphered by a pro hacker or may be a novice hacker too by brute forcing it. It is more suggestible to use a variety of alphabets, characters and numbers. Crack your brains and work your imagination to create a strong password and also change it at regular intervals of time. Your social life is too important to give away so easily. All you need to do is change your passwords and each time create a weird one!
- Social-Engineering: The easiest method for hackers to effortlessly take your social media account into their control is by guessing your security question. With this they can easily gain access to your social life and create havoc. All they need to do to gain your personal information is to keep an eye on your status updates, about details, photos, wall posts and posts for “your first pet’s name”, “mother’s maiden name” etc. so that they can answer your security question and prey on your profile. Therefore, it is advisable not to give out your personal information on any social media site.
- Cheesy Links: How many times did it happen that you clicked on any random interesting looking post on facebook only to find some stupid website? It was not stupid at all, maybe it was just a spamming page or a phishing page and without realizing you exposed yourself to some malicious person! So, to stay safe, never click on any suspicious looking link even if it is send to you by one of your closest friends. Who knows whether his account has been compromised as well? Make it a point to never click on any link directly if it looks suspicious, instead Google them.
- Apps: Quite addicted to your favorite apps on Facebook? Well, chances are that these apps might leave you vulnerable and disclose your private information to advertising companies. It is suggested to choose your apps wisely and delete or disable all the apps that you have not used for some time. Prefer using applications that do not ask for personal information or rather use offline ones.
- Using Untrusted PC: The most common mistake one can commit is to use an untrusted PC be it some sort of cyber cafe or public PC to login into your social life. The PC can have key-loggers which will record everything you type including your password. It is better to use a trusted one than to get hacked and regret.
- Not Logging Out: In a workplace or in universities that is not true someone may ask you to let him/her use your PC. And then what if he/she decides to pull a prank on you by changing your password and leave you fretting over your mistake of trusting them? It just takes a few seconds to log out. Therefore, put in a little more effort, it won’t harm you!
- Cookies: Delete the cookies and your internet history from your PC frequently. A person with good knowledge in hacking would just be seconds away from remotely extracting your password from those cookies. Avoid using the option “remember password”. Instead, use special password saving tools that would encrypt the data and save you from the trouble of typing your password again and again.
- Phishing: Phishing can be pretty lethal and without knowing or suspecting it you might just login to a dummy page created by a person with criminal intentions. Always check the URL in the address bar carefully-it may be “www.faceb00k.com” and you might just get phished!
