Facebook Security Rises After CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Fan Page Hacked

Facebook has increased it's security for it's users after CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had his Fan page hacked yesterday. 

According to the blog they put out this morning they will be instituting some new security measures to try and help prevent this from happening again. They are touting some old ones and some new ones plus they are bring back a revamped one they tested last year.

Lets start with the revamped one. It is now called Social Authentication, this is one where they give you a series of pictures and ask you to identify the person in the picture. This is being retested again and the first time this was a major failure and frustrated the majority of people who had to go through this nightmare to get on their account. 

Facebook's reasoning for this one is that hackers may know your password but they wont know your friends.  The problem with this is most people who use the site for gaming have so many friends that they add just to be able to play the game properly don't know what most of these people look like. The fact of the matter is that some of them use pictures that are of their pets, favorite sports team or game avatar so this will once again cause a problem for users trying to authenticate their accounts. 

The next 2 things they are touting are features they brought out back in October that I told you all about. First is the One Time Passwords for when you are on the road using a computer you don't know or trust, like in a library or coffee shop.  

What you do is simply text "otp" to 32665 on your mobile phone (U.S. only), and you'll immediately receive a password that can be used only once and expires in 20 minutes. In order to access this feature, you'll need to have your mobile phone number on your account.

The next one is a great feature that I talk about all the time called Remote Logout. What this does is allow you to be alerted to when another computer logs into your account via email or text message or even both and then allows you to log them out so they can no longer access your account. It is HIGHLY recommended that if you do find a devise logged into your account that after you terminate the connection you go and change your password immediately. 

To find this feature go to your Account Security section of your Account Settings page you'll see all of your active sessions, along with information about each session. 

And finally Facebook is now making the site more secure for it users by instituting HTTPS for everyones account if you want it. What is HTTPS, we you know when you do your banking or shopping and you see the little lock at the top by the address bar or it turns green,this means you are using a secure connection that is encrypting your data so it is not so easy to get access to your information on that website and also ensures that that information is private. 

This feature has been rolled out and is available right now just go to your Account settings and then Account Security to activate it. This is a great feature especially if you a using a computer you don't normally use like at a library,school or coffee shop.

Bear in mind if you do activate this feature Facebook pages will load slower and also that some 3rd party applications have not adapted or are not HTTPS ready yet. Facebook is working with them to correct this issue and hopes to have it resolved in the coming weeks but you can use the feature today if you want. And you can turn it on or off at your leisure.

There you have it. It is a shame it took a hacking to the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, to get these features rolled out and talked about. I am sure these new features were in the pipeline to come out but it seems Facebook's arm sort of got twisted to get them out now. 

What are your thoughts on these features? Let us know and comment below.