If you are part of Generation Y then your daily life is all about being connected. Internet has revolutionized normal day to day life and people vivaciously getting part of social media.
Social media in our lives now has become a cannot-get-rid-of partner. We've come to an era that we tend to have a look at social media accounts even before getting off from the morning bed after waking up. Expanding one’s network to a great extent, Social media is a place where a one can gain knowledge in many areas. How the vital Facebook play’s in some people’s life is that some live in Facebook. There’s nothing like making connections online via Facebook and other social networks. As for another instance Twitter, it is the place where real-time conversations happen more often.
And social media can be used in many other ways too. For an example, Facebook is a good place for marketing purposes and data mining stuff. It’s a diamond mine for a one who deals with market pattern analysis. Facebook one single click leaves you what people like; accordingly you can set your product strategies.
While the Internet has provided an array of benefits and advantages for today's society, With all these advantages with internet and social media, its darker side has substantially emerged as well. Many a people get into trouble because of Facebook. Maybe their unawareness or maybe thanks to their negligence. Either way number of people who get into trouble because of Social media rises day by day.
There’re quite a few ways that you can get in to trouble. First thing is Phishing. You get a link from a one of your well known friends and you click it. Then it asks for your Facebook or other premade account’s username and password. You enter relevant details and check what is inside it. Real problem comes after next. After sometime you can’t access to your Facebook account. Someone has hacked your account. Behind story is something like you’ve faced a Trojan horse sort of an incident. The link you directed is the bait, as soon as you enter your details, those usernames and passwords are being collected by a software. The one who sent the link has the access to the software and that one can easily get your usernames and passwords. Afterwards you enter username and password, link will direct you to the real site whatever thing you wanted to check. To get rid of this,
- Don’t click on any links provided by unknown people.
- Don’t give any of your E-mail or Facebook account credentials for an example User Name, Password to anyone else
- Check whether the link is http or https especially in the link. Always use secure https connection.
- Stay within your “friend” list and don’t make any private information public on Facebook.
- Always check that you’re accessing the correct URL.
Next thing, most of the time girls, got into trouble is sharing passwords with boyfriends. By any chance if the affair breaks, then the fellow starts evaluating all possible ways to hurt the girl. So sharing passwords with someone else is really matter of concern. After someone gets to know your account details there are numerous ways that one can hurt you.
So to get rid of these troubles, overall we can suggest few things. Do not deny these things at the expense of security and your good name.
- Always create strong passwords for online accounts, and include letters, numbers, and symbols. Longer passwords (at least 8-10 characters) are more secure and help prevent brute force attacks. And try not to use the same password for multiple sites.
- Split your emails. Rather than linking Facebook, Twitter, newsgroups, forums, shopping and banking sites to one email address, use multiple addresses. As a minimum, use one for social activities and one for financial business.
- Use multi factor authentication wherever it is possible and it will help you to figure out if someone is trying to access your accounts using a different machine or without your knowledge.
Up above we discussed that how to prevent from internet harassments as always Prevention is better than cure. But if a one gets into trouble, yet there are options that could take to get rid of such tantalizing situations. Within Sri Lanka there are government firms that can help you.
In case of a cyber-harassment there are certain authorities in Sri Lanka who can take action. For an instance if it is a Facebook case first option is to go through Facebook’s Report option. Secondly if they don’t take any action you can report to Sri Lanka CERT|CC by calling or emailing.
Not only Facebook cases, from website hacking to any other internet crime, you can report to Sri Lanka CERT.
SL CERT: http://www.cert.gov.lk Tel: +94 11 269 1692 / 269 5749 / 267 9888
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CERT.lk
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SLCERT
