Social Media Security - Steps to make your online life safer 🔑

In last few years, social media has made the world a more connected place. Our daily life is incomplete or we can say we human beings survive on food, water, air, and social media.

We share every personal information on social platforms every day and living in an illusion that we are secure and have a private life.

All social media connections can access your personal information. In most cases, that’s a good thing but it can be a very bad thing when hackers and scammers get involved.

Consider a scenario where you share every small information on social media, from your hometown, pet, date of birth, place of birth best friend, etc. There are many places where this information can be used as an answer to security questions while resetting your social media account.

For getting secure, giving up social media is not a reasonable option. But neither is it reasonable to carry on as if social networks are always safe and secure. You need to take steps to protect your personal information against some of the most common social media security threats.

Here are a few tips to secure your social media accounts -

• Use unique passwords for each social network; using a single password makes it easy for hackers to gaining access to all your social accounts. And change it every month.
• Use different combinations to create your password. There are multiple online services available that give you an idea about how your password is secure. i.e. https://howsecureismypassword.net/

• Don’t allow everyone to access your personal information. Attackers use whatever information they can gain from your public profiles — date of birth, education, interests — to try to get into your accounts on all sorts of services. Just imagine how easily someone can find out the name of your first pet or school from your Facebook profile, and then think about how many services use them as security questions.
• Use a two-step authentication method for accounts. So that if a hacker has access to your password, he can’t access it.
• Keep your mobile apps updated. Make sure you have the latest version of the platform you’re using. Latest mobile app version contains security patches.
• Update default privacy settings on social media accounts. Choose who can see your posts and which information is shown to whom.
• Take extra care while accessing your accounts from public places. i.e. cyber café. Log completely out from your session before leaving.
• Use VPN(Virtual Private Network). It’ll give you online privacy and anonymity by creating a private network from public Internet connection.
• Make Instagram private, protect your tweets and be selective while you accept a friend request on Facebook or follow request on Twitter or Instagram. Don’t accept requests from fake accounts.
• Limit 3rd party app usage. Don’t install any application on mobile from unauthorized resources. While giving access, please read terms and conditions and ensure that which access you’re giving while installing any application on your mobile.
• In case if you use a single email account with multiple social media accounts, please make sure that the email you’re using is having as much protection as possible. As it’s single point failure since every password reset emails are coming there.
• Think twice before clicking on any link on Email/Whatsapp/SMS. Hyperlinks for phishing can be sent through a link, image, web forms, etc. Also, it can ask for a clicking a link to get something free. Either it’s a free recharge or free membership of something.