Safeguarding your social media accounts from hackers: Five essential guidelines

If you spend much time on Twit­ter, you may have noticed that one of NBC’s Twit­ter accounts was hacked ear­li­er today and used to dis­trib­ute false mes­sages about a ter­ror­ist attack in New York. Although NBC and Twit­ter quick­ly took action to take con­trol of the account back from the hack­ers,  the inci­dent still looks bad.

NBC is tak­ing it very seri­ous­ly — as they should. The net­work’s Bri­an Williams deliv­ered an on-air apol­o­gy dur­ing the news­cast tonight, and doubt­less NBC’s new media team is already assess­ing how to pre­vent this from hap­pen­ing again.

While they react to an embar­rass­ing breach, we’d like to encour­age all of our read­ers to be proac­tive in safe­guard­ing your social media accounts from hack­ers. Here are five steps you can take to strength­en your account security.

1. Use a unique pass­word for your social media accounts. You should not be using the same pass­word for Face­book or Twit­ter that you use for email, or for online bank­ing. If some­body breaks into your email account, they have instant access to your Face­book account if you use the same pass­word. Your account is more secure if you use a dif­fer­ent password.
2. Choose strong pass­words both for your social media accounts and for email. “mydogbailey12” is not a strong pass­word. A strong pass­word should not con­sist of any words that you could find in a stan­dard dic­tio­nary of any lan­guage (unless it’s a lan­guage you invent­ed). Instead, use acronyms that would be mean­ing­less to any­body except you. Mix in some num­bers and punc­tu­a­tion for a strong, hard-to-crack password.
3. Always use HTTPS. HTTPS stands for Hyper­text Trans­fer Pro­to­col (HTTP) Secure. When you con­nect to a web­site using HTTPS, your con­nec­tion is encrypt­ed, reduc­ing the like­li­hood that some­body will be able to inter­cept sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion like your user­names and pass­words. Face­book and Twit­ter have HTTPS modes, but unfor­tu­nate­ly, they are not enabled by default. You have to turn them on in your account set­tings (see how by click­ing on the pre­ced­ing links). This is some­thing you can and should do right now! You can also install HTTPS Every­where if you’re a Fire­fox user. This exten­sion will force your brows­er to default to a secure con­nec­tion on many pop­u­lar web­sites, not just Face­book and Twit­ter.
4. As a gen­er­al rule, do not log into your social media accounts from a shared com­put­er. You have no way of ver­i­fy­ing that a pub­lic or shared com­put­er is secure and free of mal­ware. HTTPS can pro­tect against man-in-the-mid­dle attacks, but if you’re the com­put­er you’re using is record­ing your key­strokes, HTTPS won’t save you from being unknow­ing­ly compromised.
5. Think twice before autho­riz­ing a third-par­ty appli­ca­tion to access your social media accounts. For instance, time-wast­ing Face­book games like Mafia Wars are best avoid­ed alto­geth­er. If you do want to con­nect a game to your account, research its ori­gins and ver­i­fy that the game is cod­ed and dis­trib­uted by a legit­i­mate devel­op­er… before you grant it access.

Final­ly, an adden­dum to the third guide­line: If you pri­mar­i­ly post to Twit­ter or Face­book from a desk­top or mobile appli­ca­tion of some sort (Tweet­Deck, Echo­fon, Hoot­Suite, etc.) make sure those appli­ca­tions are send­ing and retriev­ing data over a secure con­nec­tion. If the appli­ca­tion you’re using does not sup­port HTTPS, find one that does. If you’re not sure, ask the developer.

If you fol­low the above guide­lines in addi­tion to mak­ing the secu­ri­ty of your devices a pri­or­i­ty (ensur­ing all of your com­put­ers have a fire­wall and antivirus suite installed, requir­ing pass­words after peri­ods of inac­tiv­i­ty, enabling remote wipe capa­bil­i­ty on your smart­phone, etc.) you’ll be bet­ter pro­tect­ed against hack­ing attempts.

Most peo­ple have no idea how unpro­tect­ed they are — take action to pro­tect your own social media accounts and make time to help oth­ers do the same.