Time to keep secure your Account

Now a days every one is crazy about social networking and visiting orkut and facebook is becoming an important
part of our daily life.This has become as important as food for life, even for some folks social networking tops the chart in priority list.Not everything is wrong with this, infact some of the things that social networking sites brings are really nice like they help us to staying in touch with family and friends. But if you are sharing your personal information and photographs then eventually security concerns comes in the fore front of social networking world.

With my limited understanding, I have come up with following points that you have to keep in your mind before
creating the social networking account

1. Don't expose all your information in social networking site if not in the web.
    Any one can use these information against you, for example your
    date of birth ,college name,place of birth or any thing
    will be more than sufficient to guess your personality and will
    motivate attacker to initiate attack.
    Once the attacker has got access and  privilege he may get the
    access  to your all account like orkut, gmail, blogspot
    YouTube, google wave and lot of other services because google
    allows single sign on mechanism.
   

2. Try to use the social networking site whose source code is not open source.
   Although the author designs and developes lot of security  features to make there product API sound and
    secure ,APIs allows developer to build new application using these social networking site as a platform. Keep in       mind once you add that application into your account you are giving your authority to the application,                         application can do  any thing on behalf of you, this is not very simple but not completly impossible for the                  developer who has some experience on mobile and web development. The point is that always check the code             base URL and the authenticity of the application before adding to your account.

3  Before log in to the social network web site check whether it is
    secure or not ?
    Always check the protocol https before logging in.These rule
    applies for bank accounts as well. Check whether the site is certified and verified by some SSL certificate
    provider.  Verisign, Godaddy,Comodo,Diggicert,thawte are top 5 digital certificate provider in market.
                         It might be surprising for you that some one can redirect you to the similar site which takes your user       name and password and will give you the friendly error like Unexpected  error occurred and that's it. 

4. Use Virtual keyboard.
   If you are opening your account from Internet cafe or from others
   computers, always use virtual keyboard.
   the software installed in the computer system may record the key stroke.


5.  Don'ts

   a. Don't accept a friend request from unknown person.
   b .Don't allow every one to see your profile, limit it within your network only.
   c. Don't use simple password,use at least 16 digit password with
      the combination of uppercase,lowercase,special character and
      numeric.
   d. Don't add any application which asks about your user name and
      password(specially in orkut).


6.  Leave the coding to the engineers: 
    Never copy and paste code into
     your address bar, no matter what it claims to be able to do.
    Typically these scripts  send messages (in your name!) to
    your friends trying to trick them into giving up their personal
    information.

7.  Don't click to the external links ,external links are not checked
    by social networking sites.