- So I received this really interesting email today,
from Facebook,
having to do with something
known as Facebook Protect.
If you've never heard of Facebook Protect before,
you're not alone, I hadn't either.
In fact, at first, I thought it might be a scam.
But it turns out that it's this program Facebook has
to help individuals who have the potential to access
a large audience on their platform,
to make sure that they're protected
in the event of being targeted by hackers,
or social engineering campaigns.
It sounds really similar
to Google's Advanced Protection Program
that I've talked about before.
But this is Facebook's implementation,
and it turned out to be a little bit weird.
I wanna show you what they asked of me,
what I had to do,
and what you can learn from all this.
(text chiming)
Welcome to All Things Secured.
My name's Josh,
and let's go ahead and look down here at my computer.
I went into my email,
and the first thing I did when I opened my email
is honestly be skeptical.
And that's what I teach often,
my Stop Method.
One of the things that it talks about
is to just be skeptical.
But if you notice here in the email
it even says, "You need to make,
you need to turn on Facebook Protect by April 23rd,
or we're gonna lock you out of your account."
They're trying to make this urgent,
which in Facebook's case was real,
but in a lot of scamming,
that's usually a red flag for me
that an email might be a scam,
is if they're urging me to do something super fast
if it's time-sensitive.
And then there's a button at the bottom,
I never want to touch those buttons if I don't have to.
So what I did is I decided to go
into my Facebook account.
And usually in these cases
if Facebook is asking you to do something,
if you go into your account,
they'll have some sort of notification
showing you that they did send you this type of message.
Well, I went in there
and the odd thing was,
they'd locked me out of all my settings,
all my security and privacy settings.
And so this was a little bit odd to me.
I decided to go ahead and look into their help files.
And sure enough, I found out that Facebook Protect,
if I receive an email from security@facebookmail.com,
that it probably is legit.
So sure enough, I look in there,
it is from that Facebookmail.com address.
So I felt a little more comfortable pressing that button
but again,
usually this isn't something that I would like to do,
except that Facebook's really given me no choice.
So if I click on this,
what was really surprising to me is what happened next.
I was shocked that they didn't actually
require anything extra of me.
As you see here, they say,
"We're just gonna go through the process,
and double-check everything."
And when they did,
they found out that I already have a strong password,
and I already have two-factor authentications set up
'cause that's what I preach to you.
Obviously, I should do it for myself.
And this is just Facebook's way of double-checking.
Which is odd to me
because they should already know that.
And maybe I should be automatically
entered into this Facebook Protect,
instead of having to go through this charade
of clicking through and saying,
"Oh great, I actually do have what I thought I had."
Google's Advanced Protection Program does a similar thing,
except I don't necessarily think
that it feels this much of a charade.
The difference here is
Facebook Protect seems to be an invitation-only
type of program.
Again, it doesn't seem
to be that special,
so don't feel left out
if you haven't been invited to the Facebook Protect Program.
But it also just means that,
if you don't have Facebook Protect
or the opportunity to join into Facebook Protect,
then all that you really need to do,
is make sure that you go into your Settings
and that make sure that you do have a strong password.
Make sure that you do
have two-factor authentications set up.
Not just once, but a backup
so that if you lose your phone
that has the authenticator app
or if you lose the key,
which is what I use, my YubiKey.
I'll leave a link in the description below this video.
If you lose that key or you lose that phone,
you won't lose access to your account.
That's why I always recommend
a primary and a backup two-factor authentication
for your Facebook account.
In fact, if you have a few extra minutes,
I would recommend you go and jump into this video,
change a number of these settings
to make sure you really lock down your Facebook account,
and then double-check
that you have a strong password and two FA.
If you have any questions about Facebook Protect,
leave them in the comments below,
and thanks so much for watching.