HackerUp on Facebook Security (2016)

Protecting Your Account

You are the first line of defense in protecting your account. You can take control of your protection by only Friending people you know, using strong passwords, using security settings that provide additional protection, understanding privacy settings, and making sure you log out of Facebook when you’re not using it.

Know all your Friends

Your first line of defense is to make sure you really know who you are communicating with. Don’t accept Friend requests from people you don’t know.

That’s sound advice that many people unwisely ignore. New Facebook users in particular are prone to accept Friend requests from people they know only in passing, or not at all. After all, what’s not to like about having a lot of Friends? Quite a lot. When you Friend people you don’t really know, you’re giving those people access to your photos, personal posts about or from your family, and lists of your “real” friends. Depending on your privacy settings, Friends may also see your birth date, family relationships, employment history, phone number, email address, religion, and relationship status. That’s a lot of private data to share with a virtual stranger. Location tags in your posted photos or CHECK IN status posts could tell that stranger not only where you go, but where you ARE at any time you post. Do you really want strangers peering into your life, or creeps tracking your every move?

Even if you Friend only strangers who are genuinely good people, you’re still taking a risk. Remember, your Friends’ accounts could be hacked. If a scammer hacks the account of someone you know in real life, you would recognize that your Friend wasn’t behaving like herself. If you suspect that’s happened, you could ask your Friend a question that only she could answer. Of course, that only works when you know your Friends.

Use a strong passphrase!

Accepting Friend requests only from people you know protects your Facebook account from attacks from inside Facebook. Choosing a strong passphrase protects your Facebook account from attacks from outside. It’s hard to believe that the most common guessed passwords for 2015 were 123456 and password. You would not leave the front door to your house wide open. Think of your password as a strong, solid lock for the front door of your Facebook account.

You’ll notice that we said pass-PHRASE and not pass-WORD. Obviously, we are talking about the secret code that you enter under PASSWORD on the Facebook login screen. We said “phrase” to make it clear that this should not be a simple word. Or even a simple word with a number tacked on to the end. Creating a strong password requires a little creativity. You want it to be complex enough that it can’t be guessed, yet meaningful enough that you can actually remember it.

A strong password has twelve characters or more, one or more numbers, and at least one special character. Use a non-word (to make your password harder for someone else to guess) but associate it with a word (to make it easier to remember). Perhaps go for something humorous you can remember. One woman set her work password to remind her of why she went to work: U&IW0rk4da$ca$h. This phrase uses 12 characters, replaces all instances of the letter “O” with a zero (“0”), swaps the S with a dollar sign ("$"), and capitalizes the first letter. Still easy to remember and hard to crack! And remember that while both your email and Facebook accounts should have strong passwords, they should not have the SAME password.

Can’t remember that many details? Most web browsers can store your passwords; but if you go this route, be sure to password-protect the stored collection of passwords. Otherwise, anyone who uses your computer or device will be able to log in as you on ALL of your online accounts.

A top-rated commercial tool is LastPass (http://lastpass.com). LastPass can also help you create strong and long passwords.

Don’t forget. You need to choose a strong and unique password for every place on the Internet where you post personal information, not just Facebook.

Have a strong password? Or, even better, a 12-character passphrase?

• Don’t use it for ALL your accounts.

• Don’t share it with friends.

• Change it often.

• Change it after using an untrusted network.

• Consider storing it in a password tool.

Log out of Facebook

Logging out of Facebook when you’re not using it is a simple and effective way to protect your account. Many people think that closing the web page or exiting the browser also logs them out of Facebook. It doesn’t. The next person who goes to Facebook.com on that computer will find themselves already logged in—to your account.

Logging out is crucial when you’re accessing Facebook away from home. But it’s also important at home if you share a computer. Just ask Nathan, a 16-year-old who left his Facebook account logged in on the family computer. During one soccer practice, his sister dumped his girlfriend for him by changing his Facebook relationship status to SINGLE. Since then, he makes it a point to always log out of Facebook before leaving the house. And remember, if you forget to log out of an active session, you can always remotely close that session from the SECURITY section of the WHERE YOU’RE LOGGED IN page.