How to Protect Your Facebook Account from Hackers

How to prevent hackers and cyber-criminals from stealing your Facebook account? Facebook is obviously your top choice when it comes to social media. But for so many other people, they access it every day from their cell phone, desktop computer, office workstation or laptop, often leaving the page without making an effort to log out. Not good! Do not be one of these people! By doing this, you are actually inviting hacker attack, which can lead to some dire consequences in the long run. So here’s what you need to do to protect your Facebook account from hackers. The first step is to log out every time without fail after surfing your Facebook page. However, should the device get stolen, it becomes a wholly different matter.

Always Have a Strong Password

Any password that combines alphabets, symbols, numbers, and an unusual name is said to be strong. Also make sure that it’s entirely different from passwords that you have for other online accounts like Gmail, Hotmail, blogs, and hosting. This would amount to creating the first hurdle for a probable hacker and prevent him from accessing your account no matter how many permutations and combinations he may try. You can easily create a strong, random password by using this free online tool. 

Change Your Password Periodically

Regardless of whether it’s your banking, email, or social media account, make sure that you periodically change your passwords to these account. While once every 6 months should suffice, the lesser the time between each change the better. Also, never use the same password for multiple accounts. If a hacker compromises one account, he or she can get access to all your other sensitive data as well.

Confirm your Personal Phone Number

When you confirm your personal mobile number, you automatically enhance your Facebook account’s security. This ensures that even if you forget or lose your password, a new one can be sent to you via SMS. To confirm your cell phone number, first go to account settings, locate mobile and then click on the icon for add a phone and then key in the phone number.

Following this, select the country where you are living as also your mobile carrier. You will be instructed to send out an SMS to the number given. Once you do this, you will receive a code through SMS which needs to be entered into the relevant column. Your mobile number is now registered officially with Facebook, which can be used later to reactivate your account.

Secure browsing is vital

In order to ensure that your browsing activities within Facebook are safe, switch on the option for secure browsing. Once you do this, you are automatically limiting all external applications integrated with Facebook from accessing any personal information without your approval or knowledge and doing any harm.

Login Approvals to be Activated

Facebook offers login approvals, an extended feature for security that requires a security code to be entered every time you access your Facebook account using an unrecognized device.

To activate Login Approvals, go to Account Settings > Security, look for Login Approvals and click on the Edit button. Tick the check box to activate.

A popup window will appear with descriptions of login approvals, click on the Set Up Now button to continue. Facebook will automatically send you a code via SMS. Enter this code in the given box and click Submit Code.

Disconnect Previous Sessions

An additional advantage that Facebook offers is that it informs you about all active sessions conducted previously, your login sources and devices used to get access to your Facebook account. In order to disconnect previous sessions, go to the security page and locate active sessions. Then click the edit icon to get a full list of all previous and current active sessions. Just click on the End Activity link to kill or erase all activities done from other devices.

Activation of private browsing

When you activate the private browsing option from all your browsers, you enhance your Facebook account security. This is because your activity doesn’t get recorded in the browsing history. Here’s how you can turn private browsing on or off depending on your preferred browser.

• FireFox
• Chrome
• Safari

Refrain From using Keep-me-logged-in Option

Uncheck the keep-me-logged-in checkbox on the log in page of your Facebook account by removing the existing tick mark. Log in fresh every time you visit your Facebook page and you will be asked to key in your email ID and password each time. This also prevents you from forgetting your password easily.

Bypass or ignore spam links

Facebook views spam seriously and always makes an effort to enhance its features to protect its members from being victims of online scams like money scams by way of indirect or direct requests made through Facebook chats and messages; phishing links that lead you to suspicious or fake websites and malicious links that are designed to access your personal and confidential information or harm your device. It is also seen that emails purportedly sent from Facebook are actually from phishing websites that have been created for scamming.

It, therefore, is only advisable never to click on any link that arouses the faintest suspicion even if it comes from someone known to you. When you receive such links, always contact the person concerned to confirm whether he/she have actually sent that link. Usually the sender has no knowledge of such links being transmitted under his name. Also make sure never to share your usernames or passwords with anyone, particularly suspicious websites and layouts.

Your login, moreover, should only be at www.facebook.com and not from any other website or link, unless the accessing is being done through the Facebook App. Updating your browser constantly to the latest versions ensures browser security and prompt detection of suspected phishing sites.

Public Wifi Hotspots

Hackers constantly target public WiFi hotspots to hack into unsuspecting users’ social media, email, and banking accounts. That’s because these WiFi hotspots are unfortunately very vulnerable to cyber criminals attacks due to poor security measures. Whenever you connect to a public WiFi hotspot, make sure you are using VPN. For more info about virtual private networks, see our best VPN service in 2017 guide.

Protect Your Facebook Account from Hackers – Conclusion

Last but not the least, sign out after visiting your Facebook page every time. This is the grand finale to all Facebook activities. Make sure you log out of all your social media accounts on a daily basis. True it is time consuming to have to login every time; it just depends on how worried you are about this. It is your call!