Don’t let your social media accounts be hijacked when using public Wi-Fi. A new way of quickly hijacking social media accounts has recently surfaced. If you frequently surf the internet over public or unlocked WiFfi zones, you need to take caution. With a rooted Android smartphone and an application called FaceNiff, anyone can now easily hack your social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.. No doubt this is disturbing, knowing that someone with an Android smartphone now has the means to easily invade your privacy and create extensive damage.
With that said, if you are reading this article in hopes of getting step by step instructions on how to use this hacking application, leave now. In fact this article is being written for the complete opposite reason, and to hopefully help protect some of our dedicated followers who were unaware of this vulnerability.
By now you are probably asking yourself, is there a safe way to connect to public wifi hotspots and still log into your social media accounts without becoming hijacked. And the answer is definitely, YES.
It is actually very easy to protect your accounts when using a public wireless network, you just need to access your social media platforms via a secure HTTPS connection. With an HTTPS connection a hacker is unable to hijack your account with the FaceNiff application because HTTPS encrypts the data sent and received with SSL, thus making it impossible to access your account.
Social media sites like FaceBook and Twitter have settings to enable this security feature. By default, Facebook’s and Twitter’s https browsing is disabled, but it only takes a minute to setup. You must enable it manually from it’s settings page. Within FaceBook you can activate the security feature in your account settings-> choose account security -> and check the box “Secure Browsing (https)”. In Twitter you can enable HTTPS on the settings page. Once you have activated the FaceBook and Twitter security feature you will be safe. There is no more need to panic and dial 911 the next time you are in Starbucks and the kid across from you reaches for his Droid smart phone.
So for now on protect yourself against hackers and only use the HTTPS protocol for FaceBook and Twitter, and for all online services that allow you to use it. Now, if only someone could develop a counter application to alert us when an Android user with the FaceNiff application is nearby and point them out.
