600,000 Compromised Facebook Logins Per Day

The case for backing up social media accounts has been further strengthened by Facebook’s admission that 600,000 accounts are compromised on a daily basis. Having said that, not all of the ‘compromised logins‘ are successful attempts – Facebook has the ability in certain circumstances to pre-emptively block erroneous login attempts using location technology.

But this shouldn’t mean that you can forget about the threat. People often use the same email address and password for a number of different online accounts, such as Gmail, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter etc. So if someone manages to breach one of these then it’s only a matter of time before they start to gain access to your other online content. Recently a woman had here entire 4GB Google archive deleted by a hacker. If you treasure the memories that you and your friends have created, you’d be well advised to run a Facebook profile backup and store it locally on your own hard drive. The same goes for backing up Facebook pages.

It’s not as if Facebook are oblivious to the problems posed by hackers gaining control of users’ accounts. They’re recently introduced a ‘Trusted Friends‘ feature that allows you to select three to five friends who can be emailed with replacement login codes for you in the event of someone hacking into your account. However, as Mashable have pointed out, once someone has gained control over your account they can simply go and remove or change your trusted friends in your account settings.

The moral of the story? As someone once said, be prepared to lose anything and everything that you host in the cloud. All you can do is make sure that you have appropriate security settings in place and have a contingency plan to recover your data if it should be stolen or deleted.