5 Smart Ways to Keep Your Social Media Accounts Secure

You may want to have a strong online presence if you market on social media, but it carries some risks. A strong online presence unduly exposes your business to hackers and you must strive to find a way around that if you don’t want them to stifle you out of business. Characteristically, most hackers are always very smart. So, you’ve got to be smart too if you want to stay a step ahead them in your social media marketing. You must take deliberate steps to protect your business from cyber criminals who are always on the prowl.

 
Here is what expert marketers recommend to keep your social media accounts protected round the clock.

1. Be Alert to Suspicious Activity: Cyber criminals are always on the prowl, the reason you must always be on alert for suspicious activity on your accounts. Diligently monitor your accounts for suspicious activity and take quick remedial measures if you notice any unauthorized activity. Some of such measures include but not limited to quickly changing your password, strengthening it or promptly reporting the activity to the platform admins.

2. Use Strong Encryption Tools: A social app like Whatsapp boasts of end-to-end encryption but even that may not be foolproof. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn use some encryption too to keep users’ data safe and secure. If you have access to additional encryption tools, you can use them in addition to what the social media platforms provide. When it comes to matters of online security for your social media accounts, you can never be too prepared.
 
3. Regularly Change Your Passwords: This is a good idea to keep hackers real busy trying unsuccessfully to break your passwords. If you change your passwords regularly and at any time you suspect any unauthorized activity, it can help you stave off security breaches. It may appear complex and requiring a lot of efforts from time to time, but it is all worth the while to keep your accounts secured.

4. Use Only Secure Passwords: It is only social media accounts with simple passwords that can be hacked easily. The more complex the passwords are, the more difficult it is to hack the accounts. What ensure this complexity are the length of characters counts and the mixture of these characters. Therefore, you must avoid using passwords that are easy to guess such as first names, names of pets, maiden names and so on. The general rule for strong passwords is a minimum 8-12 characters length, mixture of uppercase and lowercase characters, mixed with numbers and even some special and not too common characters/symbols.

TIP: No matter how secure your password appears to be, never use the same password across every social platform. Always make your passwords unique for each social media account.

5: Adopt Two-Factor Authentication: Since hackers are becoming smarter by the day, some social media platforms are now on their own recommending and even enforcing two-factor authentication on their accounts. It simply makes the job of hackers pretty difficult. When in place, it helps to prevent unauthorized parties from accessing your social media accounts. Even when they try, the platforms promptly raise alarms to notify and warn the accounts owners. Two-factor authentication is effective at point of logging in. While in place, anytime anyone tries to log in to your account, they’ll be asked to provide a second authentication factor. This factor may be a numeric code sent to your email or phone. It is that code in addition to your usual password that can give access into your account. Such authentication simply creates a huge lot of problems for hackers no doubt.

How Doxxing Threatens Your Small Business

Every day, as the Internet deepens, the lexicon also deepens. That is how Doxxing is suddenly becoming very popular even though it has been around for quite some time. As gleaned from the Internet, “The term Dox or Doxxing is derived from the word “Document.” It originates from the practice of researching information about an individual. Doxxing is often defined as an Internet-based practice of researching and broadcasting personally identifiable information (such as names, addresses, phone numbers, spouse, children, relatives, financial history and much more) about an individual.”

In fact, such information usually forms a total very sensitive package online about any individual. If it gets stolen or falls into wrong hands, such information can be used for real time impersonation or even identity theft. If you own a small business online and somebody steals your identity through Dox packages, that business could easily be taken over (even if temporarily) and misused by using it to perpetrate fraud or scams. That is how dangerous Doxxing can be to your business.

Very commonly online, when it comes to privacy issues, people focus much more on companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and suchlike social media sites. Quite often, that focus often ends up overlooking the real culprits. Many of these social media sites claim to be self censored and boast of being able to secure the personal information of their users. Even if we accept that to be true, many of their users may not be that careful with their personal information. In addition, other persons who post on their sites freely could be reckless with sensitive information when they take full advantage of the fact that many of such social media sites are interactive and very free to use. These careless postings could actually serve as sources which feed the practice of Doxxing and can lead to many different types of assaults on your business.

Now wait for it! Some companies using people-finder websites even now specialize in collecting sensitive information online and selling it to other companies. I bet you can you see the danger in that. Even though Doxxing in its earliest form was meant to gather marketing intelligence information for businesses, criminals have since latched on to it to perpetrate various forms of cyber crimes. That is why it is now a real threat to many small businesses online. Many of such businesses can easily be wiped out completely when hit real hard by cyber criminals.

Any viable remedy? Yes indeed! What to do is simple as ABC. Just protect your personal information online like never before. If you can help it, don’t allow your sensitive personal information online unless you have absolute guarantee that it will be securely protected from predators.
 

Do You Know What Ransomware Is?

Yes you guessed right! They are a bunch of malwares cyber criminals now deploy with extreme dexterity to attack your business. Ransomware now appears to be the biggest malware threat in the world. According to security researchers, the number of ransomware victims increased by a shocking 550 percent in less than a year, from 131,000 in 2015 to 718,000 in 2016.

Why has ransomware become such a big and universal problem? It is because currently, it does not just affect big businesses, it appears as if cyber criminals are increasingly targeting small businesses too. Considering the number of small businesses out there online, you can just imagine the enormity of the problem. These wares are very deadly for your small business and they can wipe you out completely in a matter of seconds. They are that dangerous.

There is hope though. You can with some deliberate care protect your small business from ransomware. Here is how. You should be extremely careful with attachments and links sent to you via email, even from people you trust. That is one very vital tip since the most used ransomware vector now, according to security researchers, is through emails with malicious attachments and links to infected websites. The next tip is precautionary. It is vital for small businesses to always have a backup of important files offsite. With backup offsite files, you could just easily restore your important files from your offsite backup if you ever get hit by any ransomware variant. However, the best form of protection is to avoid getting hit at all. That is cheaper and safer for you and your business.

“No pains, no gains. To get the prize, you must pay the price.”