Securing Your Facebook Account
Often, we hear story of Facebook accounts getting hijacked, passwords being changed and what not. Usually it is just because someone had been running a sniffer on the network, and just sniffed on your session that is logged in.
While I will not be writing much about sniffers, which you could easily find online such as this on Wikipedia, I will be writing about how you could prevent script kiddies from accessing your account, right from Facebook’s control panel.
All you need to do is to enable Facebook on https. Click on Account, and click account settings. I have enabled mine and make it send me an email every time someone new is logged in to my Facebook account. I do this because I have a few important groups, and Facebook pages under my account.
After you have enable the https settings, you might need to manually key in https://www.facebook.com. It wasn’t automated for mine.
So what does that mean? It means that when your computer communicates with Facebook server, the data transmited from your Internet connection is now scrambled up, even with a sniffer, one would not make much sense.
What happen next? Curiously I logged in from another computer and I was greeted by this screen.
I then received an email from Facebook telling about the new computer that logged in to my account.
I clicked on the link, pretending that it wasn’t me. Immediately, my account was locked, and a few verification information was then needed.
The unlock process requires a few vital information from you, and some basic security check like securing the emails that is associated with the Facebook account. Once all is done, your account will then be unlocked.
Not too bad, looking at how Facebook tries to prevent ‘hacking’ of accounts, and also to minimalise the amout of ‘hacking’ incidents towards its users.
