Secure your Facebook Account and Prevent it from Getting Hacked

You obviously don’t want your Facebook Account to get hacked because you don’t want to loose access to your huge collection of photos, videos, friends and other information and a cut off from communication with your Facebook friends and family would be even worse, right? Worry not because following are step-wise instructions, which if you’ll follow, then you should likely be assured that your Facebook Account will never get hacked/compromised.

 

 

 

 

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1. Setting a strong password

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While passwords are a vital component of system security, they can be cracked or broken relatively easily. Password cracking is the process of figuring out or breaking passwords in order to gain unauthorized access to a system or account. It is much easier than most users would think. Passwords can be cracked in a variety of different ways. The most simple is the use of a word list or dictionary program to break the password by brute force. These programs compare lists of words or character combination against password until they find a match.

 

Thus it is very vital for you to set a really strong password and in order to do that, make sure your password fulfills the following criteria:

 

i. Your password should not be a word from the dictionary.

 

ii. Your password should be at least 10 to 14 characters long.

 

iii. Your password should be a combination of letters (both - upper case and lower case), number(s) and special character(s), like !,@,#,$,%,?,&.

 

 

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2. Setting up Security Question and Answer

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Setting up your Facebook security question and answer is a vital part of securing your Facebook Account as at times of Account compromisation, Facebook uses it as a means of allowing you to recover your Facebook Account and identify the real owner of the Account by letting you answer your security question. Now before we proceed, make sure you set your security question and answer wisely because Facebook, in the long run does not allow you to change it. If you’ve already set up your security question and answer in the past, you may skip this step and proceed to “Step 3”.

 

Instructions:

 

1. Login to your Facebook Account.

 

2. Click on "Account" in the top-right corner of the page and then click "Account Settings."

 

3. Scroll toward the bottom of the Settings page and look for the "Security Question" heading. Click the "Change" button.

 

 

4. Select a “Question” from the drop-down list and type its Security Answer into the “Answer” field. Make sure that your security answer is not predictable or known to anyone else other that you.

 

 

5. Now simply hit the “Change Security Question” button.

 

6. Next you shall see a pop-up saying “To change your security question, please enter your Facebook password”. Here, enter your Facebook password into the “Password” field and click on “Confirm”.

 

That’s it. Now your security question has been successfully saved.

 

 

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3. Detecting Suspicious Logins

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Well there are some simple security settings built into Facebook – that help you quickly detect if any other person is secretly logging into and using your Facebook account.

 

Instructions:

 

1. Login to your Facebook Account.

 

2. Click on "Account" in the top-right corner of the page and then click "Account Settings."

 

3. Scroll towards the bottom of the Settings page and look for the "Account Security" heading. Click the "Change" button.

 

Here you’ll see a list of all computers and mobile devices that have logged into your Facebook account and when. You can also see the approximate geographic location of the device, based on the IP address, that was used to access your Facebook account.

 

 

If you come across an unknown device / location in the list, say you are Mac user and the device listed is IE on Windows, just click the corresponding “end activity” link and it should immediately log you out from that machine.

 

For extra safety, you may also choose to receive email and SMS alerts if someone else tries to log into your Facebook account from an unknown computer or mobile phone.

 

 

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4. Enabling Secure (https) Browsing on Facebook

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If you've ever done your shopping or banking online, you may have noticed a small "lock" icon appear in your address bar, or that the address bar has turned green. This indicates that your browser is using a secure connection ("HTTPS") to communicate with the website and ensure that the information you send remains private. Enabling Secure Browsing (https) to navigate Facebook helps in keeping your data even more secure and prevent attacks.

 

 

There are a few things you should keep in mind before enabling HTTPS. Encrypted pages take longer to load, so you may notice that Facebook is slower using HTTPS. In addition, some Facebook features, including many third-party applications, are not currently supported in HTTPS.

 

Instructions:

 

1. Login to your Facebook Account.

 

2. Click on "Account" in the top-right corner of the page and then click "Account Settings."

 

3. Scroll towards the bottom of the Settings page and look for the "Account Security" heading. Click the "Change" button to expand it.

 

 

4. In the “Account Security” pane, you will see a check box below “Secure Browsing (https)” that says “Browse Facebook on a secure connection (https) whenever possible”. Click that check box and press “Save” to save the setting.

 

That’s it. You will now navigate Facebook on a secure, encrypted connection.

 

 

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5. Hiding Visibility of your Email Address

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It is extremely easy for a person to access your Facebook Account, if they get access to your Email Account, by requesting for a Facebook password recovery email to be sent at the Email Address associated with your Facebook Account.

 

Therefore, to be on the safer side, I’d recommend you to hide your email address from your Facebook Profile by adjusting its visibility settings. This will avoid anybody from knowing which of your email address is associated or registered with your Facebook Account.

 

Instructions:

 

1. Login to your Facebook Account.

 

2. Click on "Account" in the top-right corner of the page and then click "Privacy Settings."

 

 

 

3. Under the “Sharing on Facebook”, click on “Customize settings”.

 

4. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the “Contact information”, under which will find your email address. Here next to your email address, you can set your email addresses’ visibility setting.

 

5. To hide your email address from your profile, select customize from the drop-down list and then you shall see a “Custom Privacy” pop-up appear. Here,

under the “Make this visible to” heading, select “Only Me” from the drop-down list, beside the “These people:” field and then Finally click on the “Save Setting” button.

 

 

That’s it. From now on your email address will not be visible on your Facebook Profile to anybody else, other than you.

 

 

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6. Logging in using Facebook username instead of email address

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As I mentioned in the previous step, about how easy it is for a person with access to your Email Account, to access your Facebook Account and thus you just hid your email address from being visible on your Facebook profile. But what if you have to login to your Facebook Account from a public or shared computer, or from someone else’s computer or device that may remember your email address, which further might be visible to anybody else using the same browser on that computer. This again will allow that person to know your email address associated/registered with your Facebook Account.

 

Therefore, to prevent this from happening, you should create a habit of logging into your Facebook Account using your Facebook username, instead of email address.

 

 

To do so, simply enter your Facebook username instead of your email address, in the “Email” field on the Facebook Login Page and of course your Facebook password in the “Password” field, then click on “Login” and you’ll be good to go!

 

If you haven’t registered a username for your Facebook Account yet, you can do so by going to Account > Account Settings. Here, under the Username heading, click on change, to expand.  Now enter your desired username and check it’s availability. If it is available, click on Confirm to register it and assign the username to your Facebook Profile.

 

Note: Make sure that you choose your username wisely, as you are allowed to change it only once.

 

That’s it. From now on, you will be able to access your Facebook profile by simply going to:

 

http://www.facebook.com/<username>

 

 

Lastly, I’d also recommend you to download and keep a copy of all your information stored with Facebook. You can do so, by following the instructions on this page.

 

The following video will walk you through all the security features available in Facebook to help keep your account secure.

 

 

 

To stay current with Facebook’s upcoming security tips, tweaks and features, keep up with the Facebook Security Support Team at their official Facebook Page.