Protect Your Facebook & Twitter Accounts
Do you want your Facebook or Twitter accounts to be hacked? Didn’t think so.
The next time you’re about to hop onto free Wi-fi hotspots offered by Starbucks or Borders, be sure to protect yourself first.
And don’t fret, it’s very simple.
Unless you’ve been under the proverbial rock the past two weeks, i’m sure you’ve heard about the new tool, FireSheep, which allows anyone who knows how to turn on a computer to hijack your browser sessions, enabling the person to login to your Facebook or Twitter accounts, among others. Most of the damage has been wrecked on these highly popular social networking sites, but in actuality, any website that uses a unsecured connection, is vulnerable.
The quick way to check is to look at the address bar: if the URL for the website starts with http:// then it’s not secure; and if it’s https:// then you’re in the clear.
The true concern is any website you have to login to using a username and password, e.g. banking websites or Myspace. Fortunately, you’ll be hard pressed to find a financial site that doesn’t use a secure connection (known as SSL).
Now, on to how to protect your browsing.
First off, I hope you’re either a Firefox or Chrome user. If not, download them–now. Next, install the Force-TLS plugin for Firefox and the KB SSL Enforcer extension for Chrome. They automagically check for and use a secure connection when connecting to Facebook or Twitter (as long as the site offers that option). The only thing you’ll notice is a slight decrease in browsing speed as your data is encrypted on the fly.
See, simple. And, if you don’t trust plugins nor add-ons or your job disables downloading, you can manually append an ‘s’ to “http” and you’ll achieve the same as the plugins. Another, more advanced solution is to use a remote connection or a VPN when browsing the web. But, that can be saved for another post.
Hope this helped and, as usual, drop me a line or leave a comment!
3 Comments