Facebook Celebrates National Cyber Security Month

 

October was national cyber security month.  In honor of that, Facebook has announced some upcoming security updates.

Trusted Friends
Trusted Friends is a feature that helps you get back into your account if you are ever locked out for any reason.  You just select three to five friends that you trust (this is where the name comes in), and they are your fall back.  If you are locked out, Facebook will send them codes. You then get at least three of the codes from your trusted friends, and use the codes to login to your account and reset your password.

App Passwords
Facebook is also introducing app-specific passwords.  These are automatically generated passwords that will be necessary for logging into certain apps, which could otherwise be security risks.

You can view an infographic about Facebook security on Scribd.  (Why they used a third party image service rather than posting it on Facebook, I have no idea.)

The scary part here is in the stats they released on this infographic.  Four percent of the content on Facebook is spam.  When compared to email, this is low.  That being said, that is still almost one item in twenty.  Additionally only 0.06% of accounts are compromised daily.  Unfortunately, that 0.06% is of over one billion, adding up to over 600,000 accounts compromised every day.

Other than Facebook's latest attempts to make their site secure, there are some basic steps you can take to protect all of your accounts.

1.  Don't reuse passwords.
2.  Don’t use a common password, like your birthday.  Try a secure password generator, instead.
3.  Never share your login information.
4.  Change your passwords regularly, and anytime you think an account might be compromised.

Common sense can often save you quite a bit of trouble when it comes to internet security.