There has been much interest and debate over the years regarding Facebook’s security settings, and whether they do as much as they could to prevent malicious attempts to log into someone else’s account. Regardless of our feelings and opinions towards Facebook’s security settings, we will highlight several aspects that you could focus on to avoid breach of your privacy.

There are four typical security threats that you may encounter as a Facebook user, below we will explain what these are and what you need to do in order to restore your Facebook profile back to how it should be.

A typical issue that Facebook users encounter is adware. This is essentially unauthorized advertising. There are programs on the internet that claim to give you ‘free antivirus’ or programs of a similar nature, and which will abuse other systems and place adverts in unauthorized locations such as your Facebook timeline.

Adware will not only make your pages load slowly, but they can also compromise your security.

You can identify unauthorized Facebook adverts accordingly by checking to see whether there are adverts in unusual places such as; banners, videos or animated adverts as these do not comply with Facebook’s advertising policy.

Malware is malicious software designed to compromise your computer. Your Facebook account is vulnerable if you have malware software on your computer and it should be removed immediately.

Malware can control your Facebook account, make updates, like pages and extract information about your friends. Your computer is often infected with malware by downloading items off the internet. People are often lured to download apps and software that sounds too good to be true, such as ‘download free antivirus’ and ‘see who has been viewing your Facebook profile’. The majority of downloadable items that sound far good to be true and are free will contain software such as malware.

People create fake web pages that look identical to the original, such as the Facebook login page. The concept is designed to capture your email address and password; classed as phishing.

Once someone has your Facebook account login details, you can imagine what they could do – change your profile picture, publicly and privately message people, like pages and so forth. But the worst aspect of phishing is that those people will now have a copy of your email address and password. If your username and password is the same across multiple accounts including websites such as PayPal, eBay, Twitter, LinkedIn and your email account then that person will also have the opportunity to exploit other areas.

As you can see, from access to the information of one account, all of your digital accounts become at risk. That is why it is important to change your passwords regularly and avoid downloading anything suspicious.

To prevent your access information being phished, simply check the URL of any website that you go onto before you enter your information. If you are uncertain about the URL at all, use Google search to find the genuine site.

It appears to be a common practice for fraudsters to send spam emails to huge lists of contacts in an attempt to secure login information. Most of these emails just target password information, as most online accounts will only require an email address and password; they already have your email address.

Most website such as Facebook will not ask for your password information to be verified over email, so do not fall into this trap and only deal with the genuine website itself.

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