It’s impossible to imagine modern life without social media. All your friends and family are there, not to mention any company, celebrity, or service you ever wanted to interact with.
Hackers are very much interested in your accounts and all the information you’ve shared on them over the years. Luckily, following these six tips will make it infinitely harder for them to trick or exploit you.
1. Use a Strong, One-of-a-kind Password
It takes seconds to crack “passwords” like your mom’s birthday or QWERTY. Instead, use a long passphrase with words, symbols, and special characters that’s easy to remember but will stump computers for literally billions of years.
It’s a good idea to get a password manager to generate complex passwords for you. Better yet, it will make them all unique. This ensures that one breached account doesn’t endanger others.
2. Turn on 2FA
You can be careful with all your passwords and still get hacked if your login details are stolen or leaked in a breach. Having two-factor authentication active means the compromised username and password aren’t enough to access your account.
The hackers still need the second verification code sent to your phone, which they don’t have. This gives you time to change the password and recover your account without incident.
Just make sure to use either an authentication app or your password manager since SMS isn’t as secure.
3. Take Care Where You Connect From
Catching up with the family group chat over coffee sounds harmless. Yet, if you’re connecting through public Wi-Fi, it’s the perfect time for hackers to strike.
Such networks have few security measures, and it’s easy to clone one and make it look like a real complimentary service a coffee shop provides.
Hackers use man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept and possibly alter the data transferred while you access social media through such networks. They may redirect you to a convincing copy of a social media site’s login page and then steal your credentials this way.
Disable your phone’s auto-connect feature and always use a VPN if you have to access the internet through untrusted networks.
A no-log VPN is recommended because it encrypts your internet connection without storing your activity data. This ensures privacy and protection from hackers and surveillance on untrusted networks.
4. Log Out After Use If You’re Not on Your Device
Sometimes, you may need to check something real quick on someone else’s device. Maybe you left your phone at home and need to borrow a friend’s or sneak in Facebook visits on your work computer during lunch breaks.
Either way, make sure the network you’re connecting through is secure, log out of all accounts once you’re done, and do not have the device remember your login info.
5. Beware of Social Engineering Scams
As seen in previous steps, you can do a lot to keep your social media safe in the technical sense. Still, that doesn’t protect you from the droves of scammers just waiting to trick you.
Fake prizes, phishing DMs, and messages from “tech support” claiming something’s wrong with your account are just some of the ways hackers use to try and get at your data. Sadly, they’re highly successful.
Curb such attempts by curating your social media experience. That means setting your account to private and accepting friend requests only from people you’ve vetted or have trusted mutual connections in common with.
Also, never give out sensitive or personal information to strangers online. If you encounter real technical issues, the social site’s support team should already have all the info needed to resolve them.
6. Consider Your Digital Footprint
Sharing even the smallest details of our lives online has become second nature to many of us. You might forget about a birthday post from a few years ago, but stuff like that is what hackers leverage to build accurate profiles of you.
Going through your post history and deleting any information you don’t want to be publicly available is the first step, but it might not be enough.
Revealing info you post online has a way of finding its way into the hands of data brokers. They’ll sell this information to advertisers, and less scrupulous ones might even give it to hackers. You’ll need a trusted data removal service to act on your behalf if this gets out of hand.
One good comparison you can check is Incogni vs. Onerep — these services get data brokers and other information aggregators to delete what they have on you. This way, you protect your privacy and reduce your chances of becoming a target.