Keep your Social Networking Profile Safe

Yes, with the following simple step you can increase your social profile’s security up to several times.

Step 1: Keep a strong password. Your password should be such that it contains alphabetical letters, numerical and symbols like!@#$ %^&*(). Make sure it is at least 8 characters long, mind it 8 characters and not less then that.

            THE WHY OF STEP 1

                       

With specialized software and technique (which I can’t mention here) a hacker can make an attempt to crack your account password and he/she may achieve success in that. What a hacker does is that he instructs particular software to try all combination of character present in the keyboard to be typed automatically in the password box of a social networking site. Suppose my password is 5 characters long and it is ‘cfhtd’. Now we see that the first place is ‘c’, second place is ‘f’ and so on. The specialized software can try all possible character in the first place, Keeping the first place fixed the software can try all possible characters in second place and this trend continues. When the correct match is found then voila, the password is cracked.

But even those specialized software has some limitations. It cannot find combination of 8 character password easily as it will take a lot of time to do so (years and years). Above it, if the password comes with symbol then the task becomes more tedious. It will be wrong to say that cracking a password containing 8 character or more is impossible but it is not feasible to a hacker.

Step 2: Always double check the Webpage you are opening (here by webpage I mean the Social Network Homepage).

Rather then typing the address of the Social Networking site in the browser window, firstly go to Google Home page (www.google.com). In the Search Box, type the name of your Social Networking Site (e.g. Facebook). Now open the webpage by clicking the relevant search result. Also, never open the social networking website by any link provided in your email or other source. Type it in Google search box to be secure always.

THE WHY OF STEP 2

Sometimes a hacker or a group of hacker may create a fake website that looks similar to the original one. Those hackers may send you a link with a message which would convince you to open it. Once you click, you are trapped.

It is worth taking this step rather then repenting later on.