If you’re the maestro behind your business’s Facebook page, then buckle up. Your personal Facebook profile can be a gateway directly to your business. From stealing your payment information and racking up an ad spend, to spewing phishing links to your audience as if they were you, there’s great potential for pandemonium.
It sounds like the start of an epic cyber-thriller, but it’s not quite so epic when you’re the star of the show, and not sat back mainlining a bucket of popcorn. Let’s unravel the hypothetical saga and take a look at how you can go about preventing unwanted hackers from accessing your account by tweaking your personal Facebook security.
Keeping your Facebook profile secure
Password prowess
Forget ‘ManchesterUn1ted!’, it’s so easily guessable – especially if elements of your profile are public, such as the pages you’ve liked. If you belong to a Facebook group called ‘Man City are RUBBISH!’ then chances are, hackers will be able to access your profile using guesswork alone, nothing even remotely techy.
If your password echoes your life so it’s easy for you to remember, it’s also an open book for cyber snoops. Instead, you want to follow a few password best practices to help keep your profile secure.
Keep credentials secret
Sharing might be caring, but not in the Facebook realm. Grant access to those who need it by adding their profiles to your business page, rather than giving them the keys to your personal profile.
Watch out for phishing scams
Social media can be a phishy business…. (sorry!) So keep your eye out for scams, which are designed to panic you and catch you off guard. Facebook will never email you to ask you for login details. If in doubt as to whether something is genuine, go to your browser and type ‘www.facebook.com’ into the address bar, rather than clicking an email link.
Filtering friend requests
Don’t accept friend requests from people you don’t know, or from new accounts that appear to be made by your friends who already have their own accounts, without checking with them that it’s genuine first.
Adding strangers can lead to private information being exposed, or people from your friends list having their profiles cloned. Hackers will often target older people for this, and it can be incredibly distressing.
How to report a cloned account
Spot a clone? Facebook are usually pretty swift at removing cloned accounts. You, or your friends who can see the profile can do the following (you don’t have to be friends with the cloned account to do so.)
- Go to the cloned profile.
- Click on the three dots below the cover photo
- Select Find support or report profile
- From there, follow the instructions for impersonation to file a report.
Multi factor magic
Although Facebook offers multiple options to increase security on your account, the one we would recommend implementing to have the biggest impact, is multi factor, or two factor authentication.
This means that in order to log in to your profile, two bits of information are needed. Your password, plus another. It’s like having two locks on a door. The second bit of info can be a code sent to you via SMS, a code generated by a third party app, or a notification sent to an authorised device.
Do you think that would become annoying every time you log in?
Never fear, if you head to your facebook security and login settings, you can add devices to an exemption list, which means for example, that your phone and computer don’t require an additional code, but someone logging in from an unrecognised device will need one.
It’s not perfect, but hackers are looking for easy and speedy access. If they have your password but you’ve put a two factor authentication road block in their place, it’s likely that they’ll hit the wall and move on.
That’s still not an excuse to keep your ManchesterUn1ted! Password though!
Need further help with keeping access to your business secure online? Get in touch, we can help.
