The 6 Things Everybody Should Do To Secure Their Facebook Account

October is National Cyber Security Awareness month, which means it's as good a time as any to take a deep dive into what it takes to keep your Facebook account secure. "People are seeing news stories and headlines about security problems every day, and we think it's important that people know they have effective controls for protecting their Facebook account," says Melissa Luu-Van, a product manager at Facebook who focuses on security tools. "We build these tools because it's important for people to be proactive about security and not just wait for something to happen." To get the inside scoop on how to best weed through Facebook's many menus to hold off hackers, I talked to Luu-Van about her six-step path to securing your social. 1) Do An Automated Privacy Checkup... Many people don’t know it, but Facebook comes with a built-in “Privacy Checkup” feature, which is basically a quick-stop way of tweaking the most important privacy settings in about a minute. To get to it, click the icon that looks like a padlock on the top right of the Facebook homepage. From there, select “Privacy Checkup”. Once inside Privacy Checkup, you can quickly tinker with three key settings: Who sees your posts, who sees content that comes from specific Facebook apps, and who sees personal information such as your phone number, email address, birthday, or hometown. If you're anything like most Facebook users (hi Mom!), you probably set these things years ago and totally forgot why your Uncle Jerry or ex-boss doesn't get to see your phone number. Here's your chance to fix it. 2. ...And An Automated Security Checkup Using the same basic formula as the Privacy Checkup feature, Facebook’s new “Security Checkup” gives you an easy-access way of checking up on some basic security settings. To access it, head over to facebook.com/securitycheckup. From there, you'll be presented with a three-stage checklist of action items. First: There’s the ability to easily log out of apps that you no longer use, but still could have access to your personal info. Second: The option to turn on alerts if your account is accessed from a new device (just in case it wasn’t you doing so). And, lastly, Security Checkup gives users some basic password tips, and the ability to immediately update theirs to something stronger than their mother's maiden name.