Almost every action on the computer regarding the internet involves a warning concerning privacy issues. 

The other day I came across one in particular.  It was from a website called “face crooks.” They promote a “doomsday” mentality that is hard to argue about.  I have seen hackers do things which baffle the mind.  I would not take any warnings for granted.

If I was a hacker, I would put all my efforts into hacking something that is relatively common as opposed to something that is rare.  Yes, Facebook is vulnerable. Unfortunately as a popular website Facebook easily becomes a target for a threat of a security breach on passwords, etc. This is a real possibility – hackers are getting more and more sophisticated.  Don’t take anything for granted.  “Security experts speculate that the compromised accounts are being used to spread malicious links on Face book”.  ‘Sounds like a sci-fi movie….however I have cleaned up customer’s computers that come into the office with viruses (and spyware/malware), which easily gain entrance into an unsuspecting computer when someone opens a malicious link, or even downloads a picture.

It is hard to emphasize security precaution to people and have them take it seriously, unless they have experienced a bad outcome (like an infection from a rogue virus or a “fake antivirus alert“), or learn about a concrete threat to watch out for.  Most people shrug them off and say, “it will never happen to me!”

Even your email can get hacked into (like Hotmail and even AOL).  One deterrent is to change your password….add some symbols to it (like, $*#!)  In fact, recently we’ve received (and resolved) distress calls from customers that a popular internet cable provider has been locking out users from getting into their own email.  It turns out that the vendor decided to keep customers from looking at their email – if their user password was too weak.  Of course, there was no communication with the User that this would happen!  This is causing some concerns but is easily corrected by modifying your email password if you are a customer of this particular provider and you have trouble logging into your email account to retrieve or send messages.