10 Actionable Tips to Improve Your Facebook Account Security

In the previous two parts of the Facebook security & privacy guide, I covered the various options available to a user on Facebook to improve the security of one’s account. If you haven’t read them yet, below are the links to the 2 parts of the guide.

Part 1 and Part 2

So here are the 10 tips that you can follow to instantly improve you security on Facebook.

1. Don’t accept friend requests from unknown people. One of the favorite methods used by online scammers to collect private data and sensitive information from users is by creating fake Facebook profiles. Make sure you and your children pay attention to this possible privacy threat.
2. Do not disclose your personal details and your Facebook credentials (e-mail address, phone number and password) to other users. This information can be used by cyber-criminals to access your personal data.
3. Keep your browser up-to-date with the latest available patches. Your browser and other software on your system, not to forget the operating system, should have the latest patches installed. This is an important step to a complete online security, because these patches are released to fix major product vulnerabilities. Stay safe and don’t expose your system to cyber-criminal attacks.
4. Use a good security program. We need to rely on a good security software, which includes a real-time scanning engine. This means that files you download from online locations are analyzed in a very short period of time.
5. Stay safe from phishing attacks. Pay attention to the various messages you receive from unknown users, which ask for your personal data.
6. Don’t use the same password from your Facebook account to other online accounts. If you use the same password in other locations as well, you are vulnerable to a potential hacker attempt that tries to get access to all your accounts. This has been proved in the recent leaks of millions of user accounts details of LinkedIn, MySpace, vk.com, etc which led to the accounts of the same users hacked on other websites due to use of same passwords.
7. Activate Login Approvals. Though we have already mentioned this step before, we need to emphasize again its importance. This security feature requires that you enter a security code each time you access your Facebook account from an unknown device or browser. To activate this setting as soon as possible, go to your Facebook Security Settings > Security, find Login Approvals and click Edit.
8. Be careful when connecting to free wireless networks from public spaces. Online criminals use these types of unprotected networks to access users’ credentials and steal sensitive data. To stay secure, you can use a private browsing session. This type of session removes the website cookies, search and download history as soon as the browser is closed. You should nevertheless be careful, since your online session can still be accessed by the Internet provider.
9. Don’t click that link! Since social media and in this case, our Facebook profile, is used for spreading and sharing various content, it is also one of the favorite means of carrying malicious links across the Internet. Malicious software installed on the system can affect your online privacy and safety, especially when that content is sent to a large number of people.
10. Log out of your Facebook account. This piece of advice is useful when using a public or work computer, which is used by multiple individuals.