Continuing with Cyber Security Awareness month, here are some tips on how to secure your church or ministry’s social media accounts.
I am honestly an old soul and am not a big fan of using social media. However, social media is an integral part of outreach and staying connected with people and can be incredibly useful in faith-based environments. You can use it to reach out to people about upcoming events, share what has happened, and share other news information on your ministry. With that, it is important to keep your accounts secure, and below are just a few ways you can do that:
- Multi-factor Authentication
If there’s something that is essential to all of cyber-security, it is multi-factor authentication. Make sure you have to sign in with a username and a password. Some accounts may also be able to send a security code to another device. This only goes to strengthen your security.
2. Use your social media!
It’s no good just have a social media presence if you’re not present. Does that make sense? What we mean is, if you have a social media profile but do not regularly use it or check on it, it makes it easier for someone to hack you, use your account erroneously, and you’ll never know, or won’t know until it’s too late.
Followers will also get to know what it is you typically post and will be engaged, all good things. And if someone does manage to hack into your account, likely many people might be able to reach out and alert you of the problem quickly. Whereas, if people don’t know what you post because you don’t, it’ll take longer for people to realize you have been hacked.
3. More About Passwords
You can check our previous blog post about strong passwords. Strong passwords are pass-phrases and they have nothing to do with your ministry or social media accounts. For example, Grace_Church_Instagram, is not a secure password.
4. Your Social Media Coordinator
It would behoove you to have someone who is dedicated to managing your social media accounts, or multiple people. If you have the people and are busy enough on social media, it may help to have a person dedicated to each social media account. However, this could result in a lack of continuity between platforms. But how this relates to security is that having someone who is knowledgeable about the platform and is regularly on it, posting, interacting, and just looking things over, mitigates the risk of someone hacking your account.
5. But Not Just Your Social Media Coordinator
You may want one principle person to manage the accounts, but don’t let that person be the sole person. They may be the ones to do all the posting, but it is important that multiple people have access to the account. This can increase the response time if you need to react to a hack.
6. Social Media and Other Security
Be careful what you post on social media. Don’t let social media breach your security, cyber or real. For instance be careful not to post any information related to a church’s security system, or online accounts, and don’t include information that could be a password in posts. This surprisingly happens.
There are many other things you can do to secure your social media, we only listed a few. Thanks for reading, don’t forget to share! Be Cyber Smart.
Here’s some more information on how to be cyber smart from the Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency.
https://www.cisa.gov/4-things-you-can-do-keep-yourself-cyber-safe