Over the last decades, social media has become a key part of many people’s lives. Social media makes connecting with people all over the world extremely easy and pleasant, making them very popular among people of all ages. But just like with anything in this world that contains our personal information, we might encounter hackers that will do anything in their hands to get access to our social media accounts, and preventing this is key for our online safety.
In a business environment, tools like the Zero Trust security model can help prevent security failures, by continuously verifying user access permissions, but personal use of online websites and apps is often less secure. Here are some useful tips to help you keep your social media account safer.
Easy tips for a safer social media’s account
Social media platforms have been on the raise over the last decades. When we think about social media platforms, we tend to think about the biggest platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, etc., but in reality, there are over 100 different social media platforms spread all around the world, attracting users of all ages and nationalities. Some even social media automation as Social Studio.
But the main goal of all these social platforms is to communicate with others, both friends and strangers. And in order to do so, our social media accounts might include our personal information. We do not want this personal information to fall into the wrong hands, so online security sites like https://hackprofiles.me/ recommend we follow a few simple steps to improve our social media’s account security:
Use a strong password
Passwords are the key to the gate of our social media accounts and we should approach it as such. We would not want a gate that is easy to open in real life, and neither should we want an account that is easy to access in social media.
We share a lot of personal personal information in our social media, so it is very important that we keep it as safe as we can. A strong password that combines upper and lower cases, symbols and numbers will make the hackers’ work harder.
It is also recommended that we use a different password for each platform (otherwise if one of them ever gets hack, all of them are) and change said passwords periodically. If you think you would have a hard time remembering all these new passwords, do not worry, for there are passwords managers that will keep all your passwords safe in one place for easy access.
Activate the 2 step verification process
This process makes you introduce a verification code that is sent to your phone whenever you try to access your account. Although it may seem annoying at the start, it is quite convenient to prevent any unwanted and unnoticed access to our account, since we will get instant notification whenever someone tries to access it. And since we always tend to carry our phones with us, we will be able to face this problem fast before it can escalate.
The most common hacker schemes
Recent studies show that the average user spends around 2 hours and a half online on social media, but it is actually quite surprising how little we often know about these platforms. It is slowly getting harder and harder to find someone who has never been hack, but, how can this even happen?
In reality, hackers use most of the times very simple methods to get access to their victims accounts. By using seemingly harmless interactions, they are able to get everything they could need to gather our personal information. Some of the things we need to keep an eye out for include:
- Suspicious links or files: We might often encounter messages from strangers or even friends including a seemingly harmless files or links to a site that will catch our attention. However, we need to never open these type of links and files, since the hackers may have access to the sender’s account and be trying to get malwares into our accounts.
- Third party applications: these type of applications feed on people that is too busy to read what they sign for. Most people never read which permissions they are giving to applications when they install them, so it is very easy for hackers to find people that handle them their personal information on their own will. It is very important that we always read the permissions any application requires of us.