February has been the month for social media attacks on several social networks, leaving us a with a feeling of insecurity. At first, there was Twitter announcing that 250.000 users might have been affected from a security hole. Then there was Facebook, announcing that there has been a “sophisticated” hack attack, although there was no evidence of data being compromised.
LinkedIn has been hacked some months ago and the same thing happened with The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Now there is another hack attack on Zendesk, possibly affecting Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr. Those sites have already notified us about the security breach, with Pinterest, mentioning:
“We’re sending you this email because we received or answered a message from you using Zendesk. Unfortunately your name, email address and subject line of your message were improperly accessed during their security breach”
As in every attack, there is no clear evidence whether our sensitive data has been stolen, although we are still cautious.
What should we do then, in order to protect ourselves?
Closing all our social media accounts is definitely not the answer that we would suggest.
Thus, keep these tips in mind:
- Change your password quite frequently, choosing a strong combination of letters and numbers.
- Don’t use the same password for all your social networks.
- Make sure you are aware of what you are posting on social media. Nothing is as private as it seems.
- Don’t click on every link you are asked to visit, either on mail, or on social networks. There are many cases of malware links.
- Don’t share your password with others, even when asked on a mail from a reliable sender.
Hackers seem to target social networks lately and unfortunately we cannot stop all of them. We can however at least try to be safer by following all the steps above!