We all love Facebook. Every day, thousands of Facebook accounts are hacked. My Facebook account was also once hacked, and since then I took every possible step to prevent my Facebook account from being hacked. Not only blocking access to other 3rd party Facebook apps is enough but there are other steps you need to take as well.
Here are a few steps, which you can take and make your Facebook account un-hackable.
1. Change your Password
This is the most simple task which you can perform to protect your account from being hacked. Simple passwords can be cracked easily by using certain hacking softwares. But, by keeping a strong password with numbers and symbols in between, you will be almost invisible to any hackers out there.
Make sure that your password is completely random and is not any way related to you, your name or you email account. For example: P@s$w0rD is a strong password. It has numbers, symbols and also lower and upper case letter mixed.
And it’s always better to keep changing your password at least once a month.
2. Hide Your Facebook email ID
Hackers usually hack into your email accounts first, and then send a forgot password request to the email id, and then hijack your account. This is because, any of your friends can easily see your email id associated with your Facebook account on your profile page.
To hide your email id, go to your profile > Edit information > Contact information, here you will see your email id. On the right side of your email id will be a drop down, click it, and select “only me” from the menu and save the changes. Now since you have kept your email id hidden, there is no way the hacker can send a password reset request!
3. Change the answer of your Security Question
I don’t know why not only Facebook, but other sites as well give you security questions like “Which city you were born in?” or “What was your best friend’s name?”. Believe it or not, using some social engineering skills, not only hackers but also people can trick you to reveal your birthplace or any other related questions. For better security reasons, Facebook gives you an option of making your own security questions. Since you can do that, make a really random and easy question, say “What is your best computer game?” and keep the answer really simple like ”Ice Hockey” or “Football” and not GTA or Call of Duty. Also make sure that you don’t tell anyone about these answers even in fun. Usually hackers would end up answering some computer games only and this way, you can trick them. This makes your security question severely hard to crack.
4. Setup Facebook two-step login verification method
Facebook cares about it’s users very much, and that it why it has various advanced security option which you can turn on, like “Login Approval”.
Login Approvals is a highly advanced feature which adds another layer of security on your account. Every time you login to Facebook from any unknown device, Facebook will ask you to enter the device name first (say you enter “Friend’s PC”) and then will send you an SMS having a security code, and ask you to enter that security code first before logging in completely into your account. This happens only once for every new device and is probably the most advanced thing which you can do to protect your account from being used by a hacker.
To turn on Login Approvals:
1. Go to the Security Settings by Account > Account Security > Security.
2. Click on the Login Approvals section.
3. Check the box and save your changes.
Make sure you have your mobile number verified with Facebook. Learn more on Facebook login approval.
5. Setup Facebook Login email
Another mandatory part of saving your Facebook account is setting up Facebook login email. If any body manages to get into your account, Facebook will send an email immediately so that you can take the right action to save your account. Read how to setup Facebook login email for your account.
So these are the most easy and advanced steps which you can take to protect your Facebook account, and I’m sure that you also might be having some security tips to share. Feel free to drop them in the comments below!
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