Professional organizer Monica Ricci was recently on Facebook when one of her friends supposedly initiated a chat session with her. Being a smart woman, she immediately suspected that it wasn’t really her friend, and her suspicions were confirmed when her “friend” said she was stuck in London and needed her to wire her some money. She telephoned her real friend, who then logged into her Facebook account and began using the chat feature herself. As soon as the hacker realized he or she had been caught, the conversation ended abruptly.

Apparently, this is not an isolated incident, as blogger Alfred Esa reported having a similar experience. He subsequently posted some excellent tips for Protecting Your Privacy in Facebook, and I’d like to mention one in particular: Use a Password That’s Unique to Facebook. I know lots of people who use the same password for all or most of their accounts, because it’s easy to remember. Very often it’s a word that could be guessed by anyone who knows a little bit about them, such as the name of a pet or child. If you do this, you are putting your accounts at risk!

I understand that it can be difficult to remember and type a password like #X6ByGC$%uwu. And when you consider the number of accounts most of us have, you probably think it’s impossible to come up with a different, strong, password for each site, and to remember them, unless you have some kind of superpowers!

Read More→