During the last few months, Subha, a city-based media student, has been noticing a quirky message on her Facebook account. In the Networks column under Account Settings, reads the message, “Your account has been accessed from two different locations — Coimbatore and Kanchipuram.” This began after she started visiting cyber cafes. “It’s really surprising, because I haven’t been to these outstation places at all. I wasn’t confident about the customer support, hence I didn’t complain,” she says. “I stuck to changing my passwords once in three months, adding unique characters to it, ignoring all the unfamiliar friend requests and restricting my Facebook usage to posts only.”Though no account takeover happened in the case of Subha, a rather startling revelation has been made recently by the popular social networking site that puts millions of its users’ personal information in jeopardy. Hackers target hundreds of thousands of Facebook accounts nearly six lakh times a day, a recent Facebook blog post has claimed. With more than 800 million members who spend over 700 billion minutes on the site per month, Facebook is the largest social networking site in the world. Out of more than a billion logins to the website every 24 hours, 600,000 are impostors attempting to access users’ messages, photos and other personal information, the blog post claimed. As hacking knows no boundaries and regions, Facebook users in Chennai too are immune to the mischievous activities of these hackers. Though Subha was lucky not to fall prey to hacking, engineer Annamalai wasn’t. He was on leave when his friend informed him about some suspicious activity on his Facebook account. “Some porn sites were added to my account, I didn’t see that as I was on leave. One of my friends told me about it. I immediately removed them and changed my password,” he recollects. The worst scenario is when your account is hacked and you are unable to retrieve it. Opening a new account brings its own share of problems, as you need to add your friends all over again. Journalism student Anu, whose Facebook account was hacked recently, says, “I had lost all the contacts I had on my earlier Facebook page. Finding them again was such a pain. It was sickening.” But Facebook account holders, whose accounts were hacked into, need not feel being targeted, as the site’s founder fan page too was hacked into early this year. On CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s fan page, hackers have updated his status with a message that reads, ‘Let the hacking begin.’ The social networking site also tripped up when, in an attempt to clamp down on fake accounts, it disabled the profiles of two women who shared the same name as Prince William’s wife, Kate Middleton. (The profiles were later restored.) Experts express surprise at this disclosure of the social networking site and warn users not to share personal information over Facebook. Muthu, a city-based engineer, says, “It’s up to the users now to protect their information on the social networking site.” He presents some advice to users, “Hackers will make various attempts to steal your information. So, it is important to ensure one logs into a secure browser and doesn’t share any personal information over Facebook. Mostly use chats and change passwords frequently.”
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