Since I am a moderator in some of the Tech communities of Orkut, I get to see questions daily in the forums like ‘My Orkut Account Hacked and others similar to this. The most important thing that will be lost is privacy and contacts. The hacker can get his hands on important data and chats that are stored in your mailbox as the password you have for Orkut and these mail accounts is generally the same. Thus, your privacy is invaded and your account can be misused to any extent.

If you wish to secure your Orkut profile, here are a few tips that every person should follow if they wanna secure their profile.

Passwords:

The easiest way for someone to access your account is by gaining your password. The most silliest and common mistake a user does is by keeping a sensible and easy password like ‘(hisname)123′ or ‘his cell number’ or something that can be easily remembered by him (as well as others). When god has given you such a gifted brain, why don’t you use it here to the fullest? You should keep complex passwords which nobody can guess and even Brute Force attack may take ages. Also, a small tip is that you change your passwords every 3-4 months but this can be avoided if you use a complex one. Secured passwords should have more than 10 characters and a strength of more than 90. Your password should include Capitals, small letters, numbers and symbols. I myself have used all these while keeping mine. You may find it difficult to remember for a couple of days, but you will eventually by-heart it.

Example : Kc^2nU(!?A (Password Strength is 100 here)

After seeting your password, you can check it’s strength here!

URL:

Nowadays, there are hundreds and thousands of Orkut users who make fake phishing pages and trick the people signing into them. This trick is very easy and can be used to get the passwords of any user who is unaware of this. So how to distinguish between fake pages and the original?

Fake pages never start with https://. Since these fake pages are uploaded on a hosting site, the link generally is name.hosting-site-name.com/ServiceLogin.htm If you find something like this, just STOP signing there and go to gGoogle and then click Orkut (easiest and safest).

Friendship Requests:

Orkut is famous for spams and fake users. You can protect yourself easily from these people just by rejecting friend requests from people you don’t know. Once you accept them, they get your e-mail id and can spam it or even sometimes send malicious mails. It’s good to check their profiles if you think that you might know him/her.

Set Your Privacy Settings:

On the left sidebar on the home page, you can see Settings in the end. Click there and go to the privacy tab. Here you can choose if you want your scrapbooks, albums and videos locked to people you don’t know. You can even choose to allow the ‘friends of friends’ to access your scrapbook and albums. If you wish to take a step further, you can restrict the criteria of the people who can add you.

Unofficial Mail:

Sometimes, you may get a mail from the ’so called Orkut employees’ that you should click the below given link in order to validate your account and if you don’t do so they will delete it in 3 days. If you get such a mail, you can see that the link they have given below is the link of a fake page and you should avoid it! This is just a fake mail and Orkut rarely deletes any accounts other than fake or if they have illegal content.

Running Greasemonkey and Javascripts:

‘Click here and get Titanic theme’, ‘Click here to get Yahoo! Smileys’, ‘Run this script to get your firend’s passwords’ are some of the places where such scripts are used. These Javascripts can do simply anything, from spamming in communities to giving your password to the script maker. If you think something is too good to be true, it generally is!

Just keep in mind the each and every precautions given above whenever you use your Orkut account and then you are virtually hack-proof! In case I have missed any point, do share it through the comments!