Over the last decades, the presence of social media platforms in our lives have been gradually increasing until reaching a point where they have become a fundamental part of them. Recent studies show that the average user spends around 2 hours and a half online checking their social media accounts. This makes social media platforms the perfect place not only for keeping contact with our acquaintances, but also for our business to reach new potential consumers worldwide. But if we want our social media experience to remain pleasant, we need to beware of hackers.
Protecting your personal account
It is well known that social media platforms started as a way to help people connect with their friends in the online world, and to this day, this concept is still used. Keeping in contact with our friends and acquaintances is now easier than ever, no matter the distance. But all that glitters is not gold. Our social media accounts tend to include our personal information, which make them the potential target for hackers attacks. Thankfully, there are a few steps we can take to make our social media accounts as safe as possible:
Keep a clean friend list
When it comes to social media, it never hurts to be too careful. A common hacker proceeding consists on sending a random friend request to their victims, and once they accept it, hackers gain access to all the information you have shared online and will make sure of taking advantage of it for their evil schemes. Because of this, we should never befriend someone that we do not know in real life.
Remove third party applications you no longer use
Some social media platforms allow outside applications to access their platforms for an easier management of their users account. Although these applications can be pretty convenient and can seem harmless, sometimes hackers use them to gain access to their victims information. When you install an application, you give them permission to access to certain features of our accounts or electronic device. It is very important that we check which permissions we have granted to each application and uninstall the ones we do not use in order to be safer.
Be careful with what you share with the world
Social media was created to share experiences with our friends via internet, but we need to be careful with what we share and with who. Social media accounts often set our privacy settings on public mode. This means that anything we publish can be seen by anyone. Even something harmless like an “I am in a vacation!” can end up being seeing by a thief if we are not careful enough. Therefore, it is very important that we change our settings to private and share our all our social media posts with only our friends and people we trust.
Protect your credentials
Hackers will try to gain access to our accounts by any means. In order to make their work as hard as possible, we need to set strong passwords. Strong passwords contain upper and lower cases, numbers and symbols, which make them harder for hackers programs to guess. It is also recommended that we activate the 2 step verification process so we can get notified on our phone whenever someone tries to access our account.
Protecting your business social media account
Business have found a potential market on social media platforms, giving them the possibility of reaching new potential customers worldwide. However, hackers might be tempted to gain access to our business pages to grab your business information, clients lists, etc. Online security experts like the ones found at https://pirater.me/ recommend that we always keep the following things into account when it comes to our business social media pages:
- Choose a strong password. Just like with personal accounts, it is recommended that we have a strong password and that we activate the 2 step verification process for our business account. It is also recommended that we change our password often.
- Give roles to the people in charge of a task and take them away as soon as they cease to work on it.
- Create an email exclusively for your business page. This way even if your business account gets compromised, the hacker will not be able to gain access to any sensitive information.
