Social media has gained a lot of relevancy during the last decades, especially among the younger generations. Social media platforms allow us to stay connected with those that are dear to us, as well as giving us access to endless content. Social media accounts tend to be linked to our personal information, therefore, we should take every precaution in our hands to make sure they are safe.
The importance of keeping your accounts safe
Nowadays, it is hard to find someone who does not have at least one social media account in one of the most popular platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. We share a lot about ourselves and our lives on these platforms, and it is this information which makes them so appealing for cyber criminals.
Websites like https://hackaccount.app/ allows us to test the level of security of our accounts, featuring a list of interesting things about each platform that we should always keep into account.
Our information and privacy is more important than the average user seems to understand, and by following the steps listed below, we will be able to keep our social media accounts safe.
Easy steps to increase your account security
Increasing our social media accounts security is actually very easy. Most of these steps will only take you a few minutes, and once you are done, your account level of protection will dramatically increase.
Password security
Our password is our first line of defence against hacking, therefore, we need to make sure our social media accounts are protected by a strong one. To create a strong password, we need to:
- Use a different password for each website we use. This may seem a bit overwhelming at first, but with the help of a password manager it should be fairly easy. That way, we will only have to remember one password: the one of the password management program.
- Make your passwords as long as possible.
- Make your passwords a combination between upper case, lower case, symbols and numbers.
Two-step verification system
When it comes to online safety, the two-step verification system is our best friend. It can be easily activated on the security section of any social media platform, and it will come in pretty handy if your login credentials ever get leaked. With this system, a person would not only need your email and password to access your social media accounts, but also would have access to your phone number and give themselves permission to access.
Email and phone security
Our email address and phone number are usually linked to our social media accounts, therefore, one is going to be just as safe as the other is. To avoid being hacked, we need to make sure our email account has a strong password and is linked to our phone. And when it comes to our phone number, the fewer people that know it, the better. That means that for example, if we have a public business with its own phone number for customers to call us at, we should not use that same number for our social media accounts. Cybersecurity advisors recommend getting a prepaid line to use exclusively for your social media accounts, that way if anything happened only you would know the number.
Be careful with suspicious links
We should always keep an eye open and be very careful with any link we could receive while browsing our social media accounts. Hackers can disguise their links as something apparently harmless, but as soon as we click on them, they automatically gain access to our accounts and personal information. This technique is known as phishing,, and it is believed to be the most common way of hacking in social media.
If we keep these easy tips into account when it comes to our accounts, we should be able to browse our favourite social media platforms safely.
