You should have these five tools to
protect your Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn and other social media
accounts
Social media has taken the world by storm
through dozens of websites, mobile apps,
and other forms of technologies improving
the way people communicate with each
other. There are social media sites that
have millions of members allowing them to
share photos, videos, text messages, and
more on a regular basis. In fact, social
media now accounts for almost 80 percent
of the time we spend online. We are all
members of Facebook, Twitter, Google
Plus or other social media accounts and
these accounts are often prone to hacking.
One of the main reasons for hacking of
your social media accounts is loss of
password. Hackers gain access to your
password by social engineering, brute
force or dictionary attack method. These
risks stretch from innocent fun to serious
reputational damage, financial troubles and
even legal persecution in the event that a
hacked account is used for committing a
crime.
Therefore protecting your social media
accounts is very important and here are
the five software tools can provide you
with some degree of social media
protection:
LastPass
The most common mistake one can make
is to have a simple and obvious password
or use one single password for all
accounts – from Internet banking to an
email account. Just the other day we had
reported that “123456,” “password,”
“12345,” “12345678” and “qwerty” are the
most used passwords and most easily
hackable ones.
LastPass is a freemium password
management service that stores encrypted
passwords in the cloud. The service is able
to save existing passwords as well as
generate new ones. It provides two-factor
authentication, and the only password a
user has to remember and never lose is a
master password for the LastPass itself.
Your password should ideally be 16 digits
and contain at least one number, one
uppercase letter, one lowercase letter and
one special symbol. The strength of a
password can be measured by the
Password Meter . Experts recommend
changing the master password once every
10 weeks.
LogDog
LogDog is a free product designed to track
any suspicious activity related to social
media accounts. The system continuously
scans various indicators of unauthorized
access. When an attack is detected,
LogDog sends intrusion alerts and lets
users take back control over their
accounts. Currently, it’s only available for
Android devices. Also, some social
networks like Facebook allow you to
receive an alert when anyone logs into the
account from a new device or browser.
This feature must be switched on.
HTTPS Everywhere
If devices used for social media access
are shared with others or frequently taken
to public places, it is better to protect
them with an extra security layer by
encrypting the traffic from a browser to a
social network. HTTPS Everywhere is a
free browser extension that switches
websites from HTTP (unsecured) to HTTPS
(secured).
AVG PrivacyFix
AVG PrivacyFix is a free application that
helps users to adjust privacy settings for
Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter
and also block unwanted tracking. It’s
currently available
for Chrome, Android and iOS .
Digi.me (formerly SocialSafe)
Another freemium tool , Digi.me is designed
to store social media data in case all
information is lost as a result of hacking. It
allows you to back up and view content
from up to four of your social media
accounts.
These are the five top tools to protect
your Facebook, Twitter and other social
media accounts from getting hacked. You
can either use one of them or all to get
that bit of added protection.
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