8 Steps Towards Making Your Facebook Account Safe

Hacking a Facebook account is not a difficult task because by default security settings are not enabled and most of the Facebook beginners don’t know about them. Well there are some regular Facebook users who even don’t know about these security settings and other safe steps. Okay then, In this article you are going to learn 8 different steps towards making your Facebook account as secure as possible.

Facebook Security Settings

First of all we will setup the security settings of Facebook.

Step 1: Click on “Account”, at the top right corner of Facebook.

Step 2: Click on “Account Settings”.

Step 3: Click on “Security” in the left sidebar.

Here you got all the security options that you can enable and disable. Well you will be surprised to see that almost all the options are disable and your account is quite vulnerable. Here we are going to take the first step:

Step 1: Enable Secure Browsing

Very first option is “Enable Secure Browsing”. Click on the edit and mark the box and click “Save changes”. This is to make your active Facebook sessions secure (by using https when possible) so no one can steal your data on the way to Facebook.

Step 2: Enable Login Notifications

Enable that feature and mark both “Email” and “The Text Message”. This feature will text you and send an email to you when someone will access to your account from place where you haven’t been before and from device which you haven’t used before. This will alert you that someone has hacked into your Facebook account. Enabling text message is very important because most of us don’t keep track of our all the time but we do check our mobile phones all the time. So it will useless that someone hacked into your account in the morning and you are reading the email at night. All will be gone.

Step 3: Enable Login Approvals

This feature is counter of the problem mentioned in the above step. If Facebook notice that the area of login or the device being used is not recognized then it will ask the user to enter a secret code. By enabling this feature you will get a secret code. That secret code will be used to login from an unrecognized area or device. To get the code mark the option and it will send you the code on your mobile number. If you haven’t registered any mobile number then it will ask you to do so.

Step 4: Registering Your Computer And Mobile Devices

A very important feature make your Facebook account secure. This feature registers a device or devices that you use most to login to your Facebook account. If you have many Facebook devices then try to delete those which you don’t use so whenever a device not recognized/registered is used to login to your Facebook account then you will be notified. If you see that you have not registered any device then go to this link, follow the instructions and fill out forms. In the end it will ask you to register device.

Step 5: Your Active Sessions

Active sessions tell you the device name, location and the device type. This helps you keep track of your sessions. If you find any session suspicious then immediately change your Facebook password and your primary email password.

Step 6: Avoid Phishing Attacks

This is a very important topic. You must avoid phish attacks. What is a phish attack? A phish attack is a fake Facebook login page which steals your username and password once you have entered them and pressed enter. Modern Browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari etc can be used to catch these phish attacks. Avoiding a phishing attack is quite easy. Just do the following:

Step 1: Always remember! Once you have logged into Facebook, Facebook will never ask you to login again!

Step 2: If you see a Facebook login page then first of all look at the address bar of the browser and make sure that the address is starting with www.facebook.com. This is a very important point. A phishing page can never have a starting address as www.facebook.com in modern browsers like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari and Opera. It is always somewhat different from www.facebook.com.

Step 3: Don’t login from a link to the Facebook. Always type www.facebook.com in the address bar and then login. Its not that hard.

Step 7: Making A Strong Undetectable Password

Well that is quite hard for a simple person to guess but believe me there are tons of social engineers that can guess. So make sure that you account password is not related to your personality and that you use a combination of lower-case letters, upper-case letters and special characters. Well I didn’t say have such a complex password that you can not remember. Its simple! Take any word. I’ll take elephants. If you type elephants in the password field then it will say it is weak. Now do the following replacements:

e = E

l = l (keep it as it is)

e = 3 (its smart )

p = q (just flipped p )

h = H

a = @

n = n

t = t

s = $

elephants = El3qH@nt$

Now if you write El3qH@nt$ in the password field then it will say that it is strong! See how a simple word with replacements become a strong word and easy to remember.

Step 8: Protect Your PC

Even if you have taken care of phishing attacks and strong password. A bad guy can steal your password by using keyloggers, a hidden software secretly installed in your PC. If you are a Windows user then you can avoid keyloggers by installing a good anti-spyware and if you are a Linux user then forget about anti-viruses, anti-spywares bla bla bla.

I hope these 8 steps will help you a lot in making your Facebook account safe. If I missed anything then please do share it with us.