A US Court has this week sentenced Sanford Wallace to a 30 month jail sentence. Wallace is, as many of you will already know, more commonly referred to as the “Spam King”, and he was sentenced after being found guilty of sending some thirty million unsolicited messages through hacked social media accounts. The arrest, charge and sentencing has been welcomed by virtually all audiences. It is a clear signal that the authorities are working towards ensuring social network use is safe and secure.
The sentencing of Wallace is a timely reminder to all about the importance of managing the security of your social media account. This is true whether it’s your personal one or your business profile. Whilst it absolutely does not excuse or justify the actions of Wallace, attention must be paid to the fact that a rather relaxed approach to security by users enabled him to access the large number of Facebook accounts targeted. In the light of this, we thought we’d share some tips for keeping your account safe.
One of the first things to do is make sure that your password is not easy to either guess or work out via a “brute force” attack. Whilst a word or name is easy for you to remember, it’s also simple to crack. We’d always recommend that you make your password a random combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and characters. It might mean that you have to save the password rather than just remember it, but it really does make it tougher for people to access your account.
We’d also recommend a two step authentication for logins. Facebook and Google both offer this service. The two step authentication means that as well as your password a code sent to your mobile phone via text needs to be entered to allow access. This is a very effective away of preventing unauthorized people from accessing your account.
Whilst the sentence given to Wallace shows that hackers will be punished, it in itself is sadly not going to stop others from trying to do what he did. Everyone needs to make sure that their account login details are as secure as possible. On behalf of the team here at Web Consultancy, we hope that these tips have been useful to you in achieving this.