Simple guide to outsmart hackers on Facebook wall

Technology, gadgets, smartphones and social media are the buzzwords of the 21 st century.

Millions of people are on different social platform. Facebook for instance is one of the most popular social platform and boasts over 10 million Facebookers (term used to described people who are on this platform) in South Africa, according to the latest result from World Wide War and Fuse Ware’s South African Social Media Landscape 2015 report.

However, an ugly trend has reared its head on, well, Facebook, and that is the sharing of pornographic videos.

For the past few months the users have been flooded by graphic images depicting pornography. They are horrified to see that friends are sharing these videos, but the truth is, that these Facebook users did not do it and are not even aware they are being shared under their profiles.

How does it happen?

According to Sboniso Makhubela who is popular for his be smarter than your  smartphone segment on Ligwalagwala FM and who work as a data specialist at one of popular phone shop in Mbombela’s CBD, the problem is caused by a spam that most people download unwittingly  over the Internet.

“Most of these spam are disguised as something else. For instance, you might want to download something on the Internet, then it keeps on taking you to different websites. Eventually, it will ask you to give it permission to access your Facebook details and unwittingly you will give permission to do so. That’s when hell breaks loose,” he warned.

How can it be prevented?

Makhubela said most Facebook users didn’t use it optimally. “All the options are there on your phone. For instance, you can download an antivirus to protect your phone against malware spam and viruses.”

Here are some other tips from www.pcword.com to help Facebook users safeguard themselves in future:

• Don’t ever copy and paste into your account
• Don’t ever copy and paste code into your browser’s address bar unless you are confident source is legit
• Make sure your browser is up to date
• Report anything weird that you see on Facebook using the “report “links throughout the social network.

How to stop it once you’ve been notified of it?

What to do if you suspect that the malware has already gotten a hold of your Facebook account:

• Change your password by visiting your account settings
• Always use a strong password with a mix of numbers, symbols, capital and lower case letters.
• Run a virus and a malware scan on your entire system.