Ways to use social networking SECURELY

How to use social networking SECURELY

Working on the Information security side of IT over the past 5 years, I wanted to make few comments from my experience on the major trends of exploits on social networking accounts.

I once read that a hacker was able to hack into 40 facebook user accounts in less than an hour while using wi-fi connection at an airport. We might not know exactly how its done, but believe me it’s a cake walk to hack into any social networking account through a wifi connection.

When all the accounts are accessing their social networking profiles using wifi and the private information are stored in cookie files on their respective machines. These cookie files enable the hackers to easily gain access to the social networking profiles.

How to use Social networking securely

It’s a small practice that can make a huge difference. In the last few months, due to heavy reports of account hacks, both facebook and twitter has gone secure.

Facebook and Twitter accounts are accessible at www.facebook.com and www.twitter.com. This is the common way we type the address and access the social networking websites.

The secure way is by using the secure URL to these websites. Add a https:// before the domain name of the website and it directs you to a secure connection.

The SSL secured connection makes sure that all the data transmitted between the web server and the client is encrypted and its highly difficult to crack through these connections.

As soon as you type in the secure URL of these websites, you can find a blue thick secure symbol for a mozilla browser and a lock for a IE version browsers. Don’t worry much about the signs and signals, basically make it a practice of using the secured URL.

Security is all about being sensible and educated on the vulnerabilities of the tools and applications you use. Make sure you use the secure version of FB and Twitter. Hope you know now on How to use social networking SECURELY.