How to protect your MySpace password

This article is about how to protect your MySpace password. There are a number of different reasons why you will want to protect your MySpace password as carefully as you possibly can. Of course there are the general reasons that apply to protecting all of your passwords. You don't want people to be able to access all of your different accounts online, from MySpace to your email accounts to you Target account and everything else that you use the Internet for. You wouldn't want someone to post a blog comment with your name, would you? That could end up being much more disastrous that you can imagine.

You need to be especially careful with your MySpace password, however. Lately there has been a particular security problem with MySpace pages. People have been taking over other people's MySpace accounts and then posting bulletins, messages, pictures, and all kinds of other things through your account. You no longer have control over what comes out of your virtual mouth, because somebody else is speaking through it. This is a particularly pernicious and vicious form of identity theft and attack. Lots of these hackers and MySpace bullies are doing it just for fun, but there can be quite serious consequences, both with your friends, your employers, and everybody else.

There are a few important things that you can do in order to protect your MySpace password. The first step is use Firefox with the Google toolbar. Firefox has better security than Internet Explorer does. And the Google toolbar is just plain helpful.

Secondly, don't fall prey to fake MySpace pages. There is a serious problem with fake MySpace pages that are created and that ask you to log in to them. You log in, typing in your username and your password. The problem is that it's not a real MySpace page. And now somebody somewhere has both your user name and your password.

There's one really easy way to tell if you're logging in to the real MySpace page. If there is a particular page on MySpace that requires you to log in to use a particular function, look at your browser. If the address of the page that you're on says http://login.myspace.com then you're on a real MySpace page. If there are a whole bunch of strange numbers and letters going on, then it's a fake MySpace page. Don't log in. It's someone setting up a fake MySpace page so that they can get your password and take over your account.

You also need to watch out for Flash files on MySpace pages. These Flash files can be posted as a message, as a bulletin, or as a comment on your page or on someone else's. As soon as you get into that Flash file, it redirects you to one of these fake MySpace pages. And so, of course, you try to log back in, and your password and user name are already copied. If somebody gets ahold of your account, that's obviously a problem and a nuisance because they'll start spamming people with your profile. But things can get worse. If they can get into your profile, they can see what your email address is. And chances are that you use the same password for your MySpace account and your email address, right? So then they have a way to break into your email. So they've gotten into your email, and now they can request new passwords from every other account that you have: Instant Messenger, Ebay, any online store, PayPal, whatever. Then they can even change your password so that you can't get on to your own accounts.

So here's the final tip: don't click on strange messages. If there's something that just doesn't seem right, then stay away from it. Don't even deal with it. If it's from one of your friends who's weird anyway, still don't click on it. And if it's a weird message from one of your friends, then tell them right away because chances are that someone has taken over their MySpace account and they need to protect themselves right now.

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