Facebook Launches New Security Checkup Feature To Prevent Hacks

Facebook has launched a new security feature to prevent hackers from breaking user accounts, allegedly because of an increase of vulnerability issues reported in 2015.

Users are now allowed to easily change passwords, setup alerts and clean up login sessions. The login session manager shows which computers the user is logged on and can terminate sessions if instructed.

“We invest considerable in building security technologies directly into our platform that are always working to protect your information, as well as offering tools you can use to increase your account security,” said Melissa Luu-Van, Facebook`s Site Integrity Product Manager. Today, we are starting to test a new tool that quickly guides you through a few of the options that anyone can access on their security settings page. If you see the test, you will be able to change your password, turn on login alerts, and clean up login sessions simply by clicking through the screen prompts”, she added.

A pop-up window brings the attention to the security settings, to make users less vulnerable to potential threats. The new security feature arrives around the same time that Facebook Messenger expanded its new payments feature to New York City, according to Forbes Magazine.

In January 2015, Facebook users have been victims of a malicious tagging campaign that ended up infecting at least five thousand computer users with a backdoor. At that time, the campaign was mirrored by cyber-criminals in order to prevent an early takedown. The following month, hackers took a more diversified approach to reach victims` browsers and wreak havoc on Facebook walls, as hotforsecurity.com had previously reported. In February 2015 security researcher Laxman Muthiyah has stumbled across a serious vulnerability in Facebook`s Graph API that had the potential to delete billions of Facebook photos due to other security issues.