Hackers are targeting the giants in the social universe so they can acquire load of social credentials with goals such as selling credentials on the cheap and in volume to cash in big time.  The most recent, noticeable, outrageous, successful compromise is a hacker goes by the name of Kirllos has illegally accessed and acquired 1.5 million Facebook’s usernames and passwords, more or less.  Kirllos is selling these hacked accounts/credentials to buyers with a pricing scheme of an account with fewer friends/contacts to be selling for $25 and an account with more than 10 friends/contacts to be selling at $45.  Just the sheer amount of the hacked accounts that this hacker has compromised is scary, but to think that this hacker can generate millions of dollars out of these hacked credentials is a sign of unrelenting practice of the black art, an art that is too profitable for the bad guys to stay coward, a black market with ready buyers that is dealing with stolen credentials — duplicate attempts are sure to come.

Too many people have used real names and entered real information about them on their Facebook’s accounts, these people are facing a constant danger of being hacked.  By acquiring a hacked credential on Facebook, a hacker can go an extra mile by using a credential’s information to further hack a person’s digital life such as a bank account.  This incident among many shows how easy it’s for hackers to hack social networks’ accounts.  Let hope Facebook and other social networks are hard at work in fighting hackers’ ever changing black art so social network users don’t have to be greatly at risk of being hacked.  With strong basic security practices, social network users may successfully make it harder for hackers to have their ways.

What are the basic security measures that one needs to take to protect oneself from being the victim of a social network hack?  How about installing a valid, strong security suite from well known security vendors such as Norton?  Making sure the firewall is on and is well locked down to protect the network from unwanted intrusions.  Don’t go around and installing strange software with unknown publishers, because it’s one of the most obvious ways for inviting oneself to be hacked.  Downloading files and software from untrusted social friends can also greatly increase the risk of downloading computer viruses and worms.  Checking emails but do not click on strange email links to safeguard oneself from activating a hacker’s software that has embedded within the emails.  Avoid giving out important email accounts to strangers!  Using different emails for different purposes; a good example would be an important email account for banking, and a casual email account for signing up with unimportant web services.  Updating the operating system such as Windows 7 often to protect oneself from new security exploits.  Reading security news from websites such as Securityfocus to be informed about new security exploits and new security solutions.  Do not reveal oneself too much to strangers on the social networks.  The list goes on…

I’m sure you know more security measures for protecting oneself from being hacked when using a social network!  Care to share your security measures in a comment?  Source.