Best Tips to Secure Facebook [With Video]

Speaking of Facebook,It is fast approaching the 1 billion mark, a milestone no social networking website has ever achieved.  But with so many user accounts comes the problem of protecting the users' personal information. Facebook has been hacked time and again.

In fact, Mark Zuckerberg's own profile was hacked last year and some of his personal pictures were leaked. Since then, Facebook has been strengthening its defenses.

What you may not have heard is how you can avoid Happening this to you..Facebook has been proactively removing the unpleasant images from user feeds and profiles, but they aren't gone entirely.

You are the guardian of your own information within Facebook, so you have to do your part as well. Here are some simple things you can do to keep any hack attempts at bay. Fortunately, this is pretty simple, here is some of the simple tips that you can make use of,

• Don't click on links if you're not sure

Don't click on links if you're not sure you know what they do. The regular Facebook interface is safe, of course, and so are any Facebook apps you've already installed.What you want to avoid are links that read "check out how many people viewed your profile" and promise to show you something that you just won't believe.

What To Do If You've Fallen Victim:

In the event you make the mistake of clicking a bum link, or think you may have clicked a bad link in the past, change your password right away.

Most importantly, I have been seeing many updates recently of people checking out applications that show you 'who viewed your profile in the past month' or something similar. According to Facebook, this simply isn't possible for any third-party app, and even Facebook has no plans to implement such a feature. So these things definitely are scams; avoid them.

• Create a strong password for authentication

Passwords can be easily broken by brute-force, if you choose to use a short and simple password. If you don’t have a strong password to protect your account, then whatever security guides that you apply below is not going to do any better. The key here is to have a long and complicated password where complexity is the combination of lower case, upper case, numeric and special characters like symbols.

• Enable secure HTTPS connection

In the past, Facebook used secure connections for user logins. It used the HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) only when you entered a password. But now, Facebook provides secure data transactions throughout the website. For some of you, secure browsing might already be turned on. You can spot a secured connection when you see a 'https://' at the start of the URL in the address bar. You can also see a lock icon there. If it is there, well and good. If not, you need to turn on SSL encryption.

To turn on encryption, go to your Account Settings. Choose Security from the left sidebar. Now on the right side, check whether Secure Browsing is enabled. If it's not, then please enable it by editing the option. That's it. There's one thing to remember though; encrypted pages take longer to load. So grow some patience :)

• Enable login notification

If you are really unlucky where your Facebook credentials are stolen and being used to login, enabling the login notification will keep you notified about this event. By knowing that someone is using your Facebook account without your permission, you can immediately kick them out and set a new password so that they can never login anymore. This feature is extremely good where you can enable notifications from both email and mobile SMS.

• One Time Password in login approval

One Time Password is a two factor authentication method where you can enable all logins from unknown devices to use One Time Password to ensure that only you can login from an unknown device. By making use of this, there are only two ways for the hacker to use your Facebook identity. One is to steal your recognized device which is your computer or smartphone. The other way is to steal your mobile phone to get the one time password.

• Logging out from Facebook

Though it might seems to be the easiest, but it is the action that most people forget to perform. Whenever most people are done with checking and replying messages in Facebook, they just close the web browser and walk away from the computer assuming that the session is logged out. Unfortunately, that is a big gamble and not all the web browsers works the same. Some still retain your previous session even though the web browser is closed. Remember to logout. However, now you can also manage your sessions wherein you can perform a remote logout to the computer in which you had just closed the web browser without proper logout.


Here is a short video from Facebook summarizing how you can defend your Facebook account from potential hack attacks.

If you do all of this, you should be nice and safe. Happy Facebooking, and enjoy facebook. :-)