How to protect your social media accounts | Tips and Tricks

Let’s talk clearly, now our whole life is on social media and so many of our interactions go through these tools. In the beginning it was harmless pastimes but today things have changed a lot and a wrong post can have important effects on our lives.

In fact, our social accounts have become the showcases with which we present ourselves to the world, and it is not uncommon to hear of people who have been rejected in the selection for certain job positions, after companies have screened their social profiles.

It therefore becomes more and more important defend our social accounts from intrusion by strangers, or malicious people.

In fact, intrusions can, on the one hand, seriously jeopardize our privacy by providing access to all our conversations and contents, on the other hand they can be dangerous because they allow the attacker to post content for us.

Some content could seriously damage our reputation on the net.

Finally, unfortunately, cases of profile theft are on the agenda, sometimes with ransom, sometimes without. Unfortunately in these cases it is not always possible to regain possession of your profile and sometimes you can at least block it. This is clearly a huge damage to professional users like TikTok influencers and musers.

For all these reasons, here are some simple precautions to better protect your accounts.

Tips for securing your social media accounts

To rest assured and reduce to zero the chances of your social media accounts being hacked, we have compiled all the necessary precautions to take.

Do not use the same key password on multiple sites

It may be trivial advice but you should never use the same password on multiple services, especially if these are important. We know that remembering all the passwords is complicated but always putting the same one is exactly like writing it on a billboard.

In fact, not all sites reach the same security standards, and it is always possible for a site to be compromised: in that case, any malicious people could use those credentials to enter all your accounts. It is useful to check if a site has been compromised and if our credentials are in danger, by checking if a site has been hacked and passwords stolen.

Often, after an attack, large groups of credentials (username and password) end up auctioned on the Web, to the merchandise of the highest bidder who can easily test them on other major portals.

Notes on pizzini and post-it notes are not a solution

If you are thinking that the solution to help your memory is to write a piece of paper with each password, know that you are seriously endangering your privacy and security.

Anyone who passed by where you keep these pieces of paper (at home, in the office) could conveniently have access to your sensitive data. Already in the introduction we pointed out how much damage a single intrusion can do. Often we are betrayed by those closest to us, better not to provide useless pretexts.

A strong password saves your life

It may seem absolutely trivial but the number of people using very easy passwords to discover and then complaining that their account has been hacked is huge. No, the word “password“Is not a good keyword at all, as they are not”123456789“, As it is often not a great idea to put your date of birth as a password.

The first thing to do if you want to secure your account is choose a keyword that is difficult to find, both for those who know us and for strangers.

We have devoted an entire article on how to generate safe keywords. A password, to be secure enough, should contain together: uppercase and lowercase characters, numbers and special characters (such as?! @ ° # * – /).

The utmost in security is to use randomly generated passwords; to do this you can also take advantage of this practical password generator that you can find on this page just linked, as shown in the image below.

Beware of Phishing

Obviously, putting the most complex password in the world is useless if at the first opportunity you provide your account credentials to the bad guys.

Phishing is a very widespread online scam, it usually creates a fake page similar to the real one in which users are invited to enter. The unsuspecting user deceived thus puts the credentials and in place of having access to the service ends up supplying them directly to the bad guys.

There are several types of phishing, the advice, in order not to fall for it, is to never click on the links that reach us via sms, message on chat or email.

If you click on one of these links, never, ever enter your credentials. There are many who have had their credentials stolen, falling into one of these cunning traps.

Attention: some scam pages and apps promise to give away thousands of followers for free, others to multiply or optimize your views (and the like). The truth is, they are scams; the only place where the credentials should be entered is the official app of the service or its website (after making sure that the name, the padlock and that the address is the canonical one).

Beware of Google accounts and Apple ID

Always make sure you have secure passwords on these two services. They may seem secondary but they are not at all, on both the passwords that we save on the phone and in the sites on the desktop (if you are using Chrome or Safari) are normally backed up.

So anyone who knows the Google account or Apple ID credentials can potentially have access to the saved passwords of all your social accounts. In addition to being able to access to a lot of sensitive information about you ranging from your web searches to all the places you’ve been.

Similarly, if you use Edge as a browser and save passwords, touches pay particular attention to the security of the Microsoft account. If, on the other hand, you use Firefox, and you save passwords, you must be careful to secure that account.

Few think about it, but the credentials of these services are the first ones we should take care to keep safe.

The importance of two-factor authentication

Two-factor or two-step authentication is very useful to make sure that nobody but us can have access to our social accounts. By enabling it, after logging in with your username and password a unique code must be entered received via SMS to your phone number or email.

We understand how the security of our social accounts improves considerably, allowing us to have more peaceful dreams.

Each social network, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, has two-factor authentication. It can be enabled simply by going to the settings and pressing on the appropriate option (usually found in the section called “Security and password“).

We have dedicated to the topic of specific guides:

It is also advisable, as mentioned in the previous paragraph, to enable double authentication also on Google accounts and on the Apple ID.

Beware of public WiFi networks

It is strongly recommended that you never use an unsecured WiFi network to access important services; capturing the data packets was, and sometimes is, quite simple to trace the credentials of different social networks.

If you need to access your important services via public WiFi networks, it is advisable to have a good VPN, preferably for a fee, so you can be sure that even if your traffic is intercepted, it will still be unreadable.

Summary of all the precautions to make your social networks safe

To sum it up, here’s a quick list of our tips for securing your social media accounts: