Secure Your Facebook
If you are a Facebook addict you are probably aware of the new wave of spam links, status updates, and photos that have flooded your homepage. The photos and links require you to like them in order to reveal the full link or photo, and that's where your security gets compromised. The links are visually appealing or quite the opposite, either way if you happen to click one of these there are few immediate steps you should take to secure your account from malicious activities that these third party links might inflict on your account.
1) First and foremost, change your password immediately. Doing this stops remote access to your account. Try to keep a password that uses lots of special characters, uppercase and lower case letters and numbers, you can even keep blank space in between to increase the length of your password. Preferably passwords that are at least 6 characters long are always tougher to break.
Try out this useful password strength checker by Microsoft. Type in your password and see how strong it is
http://bit.ly/fvaesw
2) Check your Account Settings - Open your account settings situated at the top left corner of your homepage. Make sure the following are enabled
a) Secure Browsing - Usually this is enabled by default, if its not, turn it on. This enhances the security. Almost immediately you'll see your address bar change from http:// to https://
b) Login Notifications - Enabling this notifies you about unauthorized access to your account by a computer or mobile that you haven't used before.
3) Active Sessions - This is a relatively new security feature integrated in Facebook and probably the most useful one. This lets see you see active sessions to your account and from where your account was last accessed. It lists complete details of account information and when it was last accessed and on which device. You can manually stop suspicious sessions that you don't recognize.
4) Last but not the least, the security of your account depends on how vigilant you are. Do not click links or photos that require you to like the link in order to reveal the full message or copy some text (usually some kind of code ) to your browser address bar. If you come across suspicious links, make sure you report it.te
5) Lastly if you've been affected by the spam, make sure you report it to facebook as spam/offensive and delete it from your wall and tell your friends and family to do so. However if you've been infected with it simply blocking it won't help. Deactivate your account for a day and voila! it should be gone.
Follow all these and stay safe
