Would you like to have your account to be easily accessible to the awesome hackers out there? Of course not! In the past week, we have seen hackers attacking US government websites, turning Burger King’s Twitter profile picture into McDonalds, Apple and more to come. If these high secured accounts are hacked, where do our accounts stand? It would be a piece of cake for most of those advanced hackers to easily hack our accounts. I had my blog hacked once and the pain was unbearable. For an hour, I was completely confident that I had lost my blog and ‘this is it’ but thanks to my hosting service, they managed to bring it back again.
How do you figure out that your account is vulnerable? Here are the three reasons
Easy Password eg. lily, important etc
Using the same password for all your accounts
Plain simple answer to those security questions.
It has been found out that accounts are easily hacked by guessing the password reset challenge question.
Let’s say Facebook uses this option. You have your profile flooded with the pictures of HALO (renowned XBOX 360 Game). Now, if your question asks “Your Favourite Video Game”, the hacker would instantly know the answer. This is just an example . I am sure you are much more clever and will not be so dumb to have such easy answers set up!
In order to stay more secure, users are using the ‘two factor authentication’ service. Companies such as Telesign are offering this great service to make sure the users no longer need to be afraid of losing their accounts
So what is two factor authentication? It’s simply an additional layer of security for your account of the particular website. You need to verify that the website that you are signing up has the two factor authentication enabled.
Let’s have another scenario. Imagine you are in a cafe or in any other public place and have forgotten your password. When you ask for a new password, this notifies the company to send you a verification code via SMS/Voice call. Once you enter the correct code, you are authenticated and then can proceed to change the password. So if there’s any attempt to hack your account via resetting the password, you will be notified and you could immediately change the password! All you need is a phone for this great service!
Though it might take a little extra time than the normal procedure, it’s totally worth it.
Are you using any authentication services? Let us know in the comments below!
