Now a days every one is crazy about social networking and visiting orkut and facebook is becoming an important
part of our daily life.This has become as important as food for life, even for some folks social networking tops the chart in priority list.Not everything is wrong with this, infact some of the things that social networking sites brings are really nice like they help us to staying in touch with family and friends. But if you are sharing your personal information and photographs then eventually security concerns comes in the fore front of social networking world.
With my limited understanding, I have come up with following points that you have to keep in your mind before
creating the social networking account
1. Don’t expose all your information in social networking site if not in the web.
Any one can use these information against you, for example your
date of birth ,college name,place of birth or any thing
will be more than sufficient to guess your personality and will
motivate attacker to initiate attack.
Once the attacker has got access and privilege he may get the
access to your all account like orkut, gmail, blogspot
YouTube, google wave and lot of other services because google
allows single sign on mechanism.
2. Try to use the social networking site whose source code is not open source.
Although the author designs and developes lot of security features to make there product API sound and
secure ,APIs allows developer to build new application using these social networking site as a platform. Keep in mind once you add that application into your account you are giving your authority to the application, application can do any thing on behalf of you, this is not very simple but not completly impossible for the developer who has some experience on mobile and web development. The point is that always check the code base URL and the authenticity of the application before adding to your account.
3 Before log in to the social network web site check whether it is
secure or not ?
Always check the protocol https before logging in.These rule
applies for bank accounts as well. Check whether the site is certified and verified by some SSL certificate
provider. Verisign, Godaddy,Comodo,Diggicert,thawte are top 5 digital certificate provider in market.
It might be surprising for you that some one can redirect you to the similar site which takes your user name and password and will give you the friendly error like Unexpected error occurred and that’s it.
4. Use Virtual keyboard.
If you are opening your account from Internet cafe or from others
computers, always use virtual keyboard.
the software installed in the computer system may record the key stroke.
5. Don’ts
a. Don’t accept a friend request from unknown person.
b .Don’t allow every one to see your profile, limit it within your network only.
c. Don’t use simple password,use at least 16 digit password with
the combination of uppercase,lowercase,special character and
numeric.
d. Don’t add any application which asks about your user name and
password(specially in orkut).
6. Leave the coding to the engineers:
Never copy and paste code into
your address bar, no matter what it claims to be able to do.
Typically these scripts send messages (in your name!) to
your friends trying to trick them into giving up their personal
information.
7. Don’t click to the external links ,external links are not checked
by social networking sites.
Leave a Reply