How to Secure our Social Media Accounts and Stay Safe Online?????

How to Secure our Social Media Accounts?

It’s of no surprise that people are more concerned about the security of social media accounts more than that of their personal diaries as most of the confidential information is now a day stored on their social media accounts.

Most of the people have a habit of storing their important work regarding credentials in the draft section of their account. Incase such an account is hacked, an entire organization that person is serving is at risk. So it’s very important to know how to secure your social media account.

Securing your Social Media Accounts

It’s totally under your control that how to secure your social media accounts. In order to secure the social media accounts all you have to do is adopt a few security practices which are listed as follows:

1.) Practice using strong passwords for social media accounts

Users are allowed to select the password of their own choice. Hence most of the users select short and easy passwords so that they are easy to remember. Such accounts are at risk of getting hacked. So to counter this it is always recommended to use strong passwords.

Strong passwords generally consist of:

Length of more than 10 characters.
Combination of Uppercase and Lowercase alphabets, Special Symbols, and numbers.
Random selection of strings instead of using dictionary words.

Following is the chart showing the length of the password and its corresponding strength:

secure password

2.) Using Cryptographic hashes as passwords

The most secure way of protecting the account from getting hacked is using the cryptographic hashes of certain strings as a password. SHA and MD5 hashes are very popular for hashing certain data in cryptography.

Hashing is the method in cryptography by which input data is converted to a unique string of text of the same length regardless of the size of the input method.

Let us consider this with an example. Suppose a user wants to use “pass1234” as a password.

Even though it is 8 characters long and contains a combination of both alphabets as well as numbers yet it can be cracked by using password cracking tools.

So we calculate the hash of this password using the MD5 hash calculator.

Hashed password is: 3e238da44a3f180f320a1e647b62b67c

This password seems to be much stronger and certainly impossible for hackers to crack it.

This way using Hashed Passwords make the social media accounts secure.

3.) Updating Security Policies

Whenever you create a social media account, you are provided with the default security policies. These policies are largely concerned with sharing your personal details on the social media platform.

This greatly increased the possibility of your personal information being collected by the third party.

So once you have created your account, you must review all the security policies before posting anything online and modify them according to your convenience.

4.) Regular updation of the password

Until your account is not hacked, you don’t usually change the password. But day by day as more and more password cracking attempt occurs, the database of known passwords is also being constantly updated.

So it is advised to always keep changing your passwords in the span of three months. Even if someone is trying to crack your password from the last three months and about to succeed in next month, by changing the password you will ensure that he has to start working all over again.

If this content is exposed to the familiar people then it will be embarrassing stuff for that user, making it difficult for him/her to roam around in public again, facing others.

5.) Avoid using the same password over multiple accounts

As it seems to be great ease of using the same passwords for all social media accounts as you don’t have to remember multiple passwords. But it is the riskiest thing you are doing.

When the attacker is successful in cracking your any social media account password, he is wise enough to try it at every other social media accounts of yours. This way you will totally lose all of your social accounts with just one hacked account.

6.) Avoid connecting with the unknown people

It’s totally up to you whom you want to add to your account. You must connect to only the known persons. Otherwise approving requests from an unknown person greatly increases the chances of ‘Social Engineering’, by which your personal information is at risk.

Based on the information gathered they could furthermore even break into your account as well. So it is recommended to limit the audience on your social media account.

So, If you like this post on How to Secure our Social Media Accounts and Stay Safe Online and learn something new then please SHARE it with your friends to help them to be aware of these things.

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