Safequarding Your Orkut Profile

by Karan Goel

With the spread of social networking came a whole lot of security concerns, especially for those who’re actively involved and have a good amount of their personal information stored online.

Orkut, being a slightly older social network, has been known to have quite a bit of nefarious activity going on. If you wish to secure yourself and your online avatar on Orkut, here are a few tips to do so…

Secure your Password
The easiest way for someone to access all of your information is to gain your password. To ensure that this doesn’t happen, never use Orkut or any other social networking software at a cybercafe you’re not familiar with (or if possible, don’t use it at ANY cybercafe). It’s really easy to install malicious programs such as Key-Loggers that record your keystrokes and allow people to phish for your login details easily at such places. Needless to say, never enter your login details into a third party site and always look for the line https://www.google.com/accounts/ServiceLogin?… in your URL while logging in.

Orkut’s known for spam from autobots and random “fraandsheep” requests. Be vigilant and don’t accept friend requests from every Tom, Dickwinder and Hari that sends one your way.

Set your Privacy Settings
In Orkut’s Privacy settings (which comes under ‘My Settings’) the last box allows you to set privileges or rights for what kind of content of yours is accessible to fellow social networkers. If you wish your scrap book, videos, testimonials or photos to be private, set them to allow “only friends” or “only friends of friends” to view them. This ensures that not every troll out there has access to your profile. If you wish to take it a step further, you can set it up so that that only friends of friends, or only people who know your email address can send you friend requests.

Accept Friend Requests Cautiously
Orkut’s known for spam from autobots and random “fraandsheep” requests. Be vigilant and don’t accept friend requests from every Tom, Dickwinder and Hari that sends one your way. In fact, its a good idea to check someone’s profile before you accept their request, to ensure they’re not the social degenerate or sexually frustrated low-life that would creep you out.

Beware of Unofficial Mail
Every now and then you’ll come across some fishy looking email in your inbox, telling you that you need to ‘reconfirm’ your details (i.e. password) in order to continue using Orkut. Ignore any such mail and block those that send it. There are loads of people out there who come with with legit looking mailers and/or websites that ask you for your login details, please beware of them and trust only the main site with your account details.

Downloading Files for Orkut = Bad!
A lot of unofficial sites offer supposedly “powerful applications” that are nothing but stacks of Trojans and key-loggers. Don’t download anything but official Orkut applications to ensure that you don’t get screwed over.

Ensure your Password’s not easy
Last but not the least, please ensure that your password is everything but easy to crack. Keeping it a variation of your name and/or your last name is downright retarded; please refrain from doing so. Using a mix of alphabetical and numeric characters is a great idea. Most of the time we get lazy and decide to keep it something that’s easy to remember, which, in most cases, is easy to crack too. Keep a difficult password and remember it! If your memory sucks as much as mine does, write it down in a diary you own, or any other place that’s only accessible to you.

That’s about it for this list. If you think we’ve missed out on something, or wish to add a few tips of your own, please share them with all of us via a comment!