Monday morning as I was checking my email via my phone I noticed an alert from Facebook.

The email said, “Hi Scott Howard,

It looks like someone used your Facebook account to log into Facebook for Android (Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 9:07pm).

Was this you? If so, you can disregard the rest of this email.

No, it wasn’t me.  9:07pm was California Time.  Translate it to Indiana time and that’s 7 minutes past midnight.  I was fast asleep.

But due to the busyness of my morning at the moment I saw the email, i did nothing about it.

A couple hours later, I get a couple messages from friends and family alerting me to out of the ordinary postings on my Facebook page.

A light goes off in my Monday morning brain and I go to work at taking care of the problem.

So I went to my Facebook page and reset the password.

I went to my other social media accounts and reset those passwords

I went to every single account I access online and reset those passwords.

It was a pain.

But it would be more of a pain if I continued to ignore the warning.

Over the weekend I was listening to a radio show in Detroit about web and computer stuff and there was a guest on the program that was conned by someone via an online dating sight.  The website was legit, but the scammers were not.

What caught my attention while listening to this story was the patience that the scammer had.  Two months of daily online contact with the victim to build trust.  Then he asked her for a “small loan of a couple thousand dollars.”

Relate this back to my Facebook account being hacked, and if I had continued to ignore the warning from Facebook, the hacker could have waited too.

While they didn’t wait 2 months, they waited a good 8 hours before posting a spammy message.

Internet security is only as good as the person behind the keyboard.

Change your passwords regularly.

Create a system to remember your passwords because they should be different for every account.

Facebook has a few tips that most of us have never read at https://www.facebook.com/help/?page=132501803490562

I could go on and on about this but instead, I’ll let you chime in.

Any other suggestions?