It’s been almost a year since I volunteered to give my readers my Google password, after enabling 2-step verification that is. I ended the blogpost on that topic with

And now off to Facebook security settings, to enable login notifications & approvals.

And although I did activate “login notifications” at that point, I did not enable approvals (for reasons I don’t remember, maybe I was just being lazy).

Fast-forward to yesterday evening, when I received a mail from Facebook that stated that my account was temporarily locked because my is was logged into from a location I had never used before. I immediately changed my password and finally enabled “login approvals” this morning as well. “Approvals” sends a security code via SMS when logging in from an unknown location, which you’ll have to enter before effectively logging in. I was pleasantly surprised to see Facebook added a Google Authenticator-like code generator to their Android and iOS apps that you can use to generate a security code as well. Adding the extra security of login approval is easy enough. If you’re on Facebook or Google, you really should consider enabling those (with or without their respective smartphone-based security code generators).

One downside though; using an external chat client (Mozilla Thunderbird in my case) to access Facebook Chat over XMPP doesn’t work any more as Facebook doesn’t provide “application specific passwords” like Google does. Update: as Jensen points out in the comments below Facebook does have application passwords, so I reenabled Facebook Chat in Thunderbird. But that might be a good thing anyway, as the warning mail I received from Facebook seems to refer to the use of Facebook chat over XMPP;

It looks like someone logged into “Rtgw_xmpp_username_password_login” on Wednesday, November 14, 2012 at 9:04pm.

Not 100% sure if this was a real login attempt or a false positive, but apparently I’m not the first one to receive such a warning.