The purpose of this article is widely supported by idiom. Your level of awareness can be judged by choosing one idiom that you follow between ‘Ignorance is bliss’ or ‘Precaution is better than cure.’
Indians are aware of all the felony and misdeed that can happen to them, but we only enjoy being the audience and never even consider that we too can stand in the victim’s shoes.
Just imagine what all can you do with a friend’s Facebook password? Please stop mentally deviously plotting his destruction and imagine the same situation but, this time, the roles are flipped.Scary, right?
We often stay in denial and believe that we can never be a victim. This time, let’s not be skeptical and learn some tricks to keep your Facebook account secure and also the steps that you should follow in case your account is hacked.
How Can Hackers Reach You?
1) Phishing: Here, people set up Fake Websites or web pages and tempt you to provide the login information. Sometimes they can even send fake emails addressing themselves as Facebook. The later can be ignored by not providing your E-mail id directly on your account. The former one can be minimized by using good antivirus software.
2) Keylogging: This is a file which once downloaded will send all the characters(keys) you type to their server. This can be easily detected by an Anti-virus. This process is so easy that you can try it too on your own PC.
3) Trojans: They are the corrupted servers which when sent to a client’s PC will open a backdoor through which the hacker can access the entire system.
4) Sniffing: It would sense the ongoing communication between the server and client and would relay the servers to attract attention towards itself and make the server believe that a genuine connection is laid between him and the server.
5) Cookie Thief: Exactly as it sounds. Someone take possession over all your cookies to extract password and username for login to various platforms. To ignore this incognito mode can be used on your browser.
Web Browser – The Culprit
Your security depends a lot on the browser that you use. It is a matter of comfort and need to choose among the various available browser including Chrome, Vivaldi, Mozilla Firefox, Edge, Apple’s Safari, Opera and for the unfortunate one’s Internet Explorer (Get onto Windows 10 ASAP).
As far as security is concerned, Google Chrome is a popular choice. It allows you to be able to enjoy an enormous number of free add-ons and extensions. Since you are considering Google Chrome, you should also be aware of its cons, the major one of which is that it reveals the saved login information along with passwords by few flicks.
The logic behind cache is that any browser keeps the content on a server or physical space before displaying it to you. That means if you can find the proper URL from the cache files it won’t only help you hack others accounts also using that means that you can save or watch your online videos or other files without wasting any more bandwidth.
For any other browsers, it is as simple as accessing the cache files and finding the required URL since Chrome does not store extensions of the files accessed you cannot distinguish the required one.
Luckily, we have a solution ChromeCacheView. Just download and install this file in C drive. Once you have unzipped it, execute (ChromeCacheView.exe).
After opening that file, you will automatically be directed to the Cache file and all the log will be extracted.
To choose the particular type(extension) of the file, go to top bar and click options. Check the desired ones, to filter.
Finally, right click on the respective file to choose the file which you wish to save in your local storage.
Filter The Linked Apps Carefully
We are sure that any active Facebook user signs up for at least a dozen apps/sites/services/quizzes every day where you are required to provide your Facebook information. We are are not necessarily asking you to be suspicious every time, but a little alertness can always come in handy given that we have witnessed many incidents in past where even highly secured sites were hacked and ended up exposing all our confidential details for exploitation.
Always make sure when and where to use your Facebook account or Google account for commenting or accessing other websites. We understand that the sign up popups/ads can sometimes make you use your over-used right of intolerance being an Indian, for that you can install Adblock Plus for Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, Android, Safari and other few browsers.
Double Protection
Always opt for a 2-step login or security. For Facebook, Go to Settings > Security > Login Alerts > Choose Get Notifications. One of the most useful function Facebook offers is being able to see your past login history and control them.
Ig you want to see an account’s login history, go to Settings > Security > Where you’re logged in. In this, you will get the details of your account login history through mobile as well as Desktops separately.
In addition, it will be a safe choice to hide all your contact information from Public. You can even consider changing the privacy to only me.
Http OR Https
Http and Https have all the functions and outcomes exactly alike except the fact that https is much more secure since it uses Transport Layer Security (TLS). In short, https will encrypt your activity log on Facebook which will in turn, make it harder to be attacked.
There is no need to be alarmed since last two years; Facebook uses https by default on all the Desktops worldwide and on around 80% mobile browsers.
Discussing the obvious
Do not share your Facebook passwords with ANYONE. Regardless of whether he is the love of your life/your landlord/best friend/spiritual guide/your dog. Be protective about it. Wherever you are using public cyber centers, always work in incognito mode.
Do not save your password in files inside your local storage. Choose a unique password, maybe some word that does not make sense to anyone else or a combination of numeric and alphabetic characters it can also include the special character for added security.
There is a list of common passwords that hackers try during Dictionary or Brute force hacking algorithm.
- 123456
- password
- 12345
- 12345678
- qwerty
- 123456789
- 12345
- baseball
- dragon
- football
- 1234567
- monkey
- letmein
- abc123
- 111111
- mustang
- access
- shadow
- master
- michael
- superman
- 696969
- 123123
- batman
- trustno1
If your password is one among them stop reading the article and change the password, wait to bookmark the article. Set a security question. It can be used for recovery as well as will provide an extra security to your account.
You can generate App password for every app in particular. So that you won’t have to share your Facebook password with them: Settings > Security > App password. Now, enter the name of the particular app.
The system will give you a password. Once this password is entered in that app, it won’t ask for your login details the next time you log in.
If your account is hacked
If you have ignored, all these precautions or this article reached you late. You can still save the humiliation and exploitation of your name by reporting to Facebook that your account was hacked. And also, ask your friends to report your account as spam. The number of reports will inversely be proportional to the time taken to block your account.
