Originally designed for gamers, but now popular among a wide variety of subcultures (both off and on the internet), Discord has become the go-to when it comes to fostering communities and finding new friends online.
With a simple user interface and a lot of freedom to customize a server with unique roles, bots, and text/voice channels, it’s even relatively easy to create your own server and establish your own unique community.
That being said, the sudden rise in popularity of this voIP (voice over IP) undoubtedly comes in hand with the new risk of people who threaten the security of its users. Namely, the risk of your account as well as your server.
Today, we’ll dive a little deeper into the various ways that your Discord experience can be hijacked, and offer some advice to those who are concerned about their safety over the internet.
Let’s start by talking about servers being hacked. Servers, as entities pertinent to Discord’s platform and structure, are the biggest concern that many may have, especially if you’re a server owner yourself.
The good news here is that, technically, a server can’t be hacked per say. Servers most definitely can, however, be raided and griefed. The difference here is important to highlight since it will help you more fully understand what approach you can take to protect your server.
When a server is raided and tampered with, this usually means that either the account of the admin or someone else with important privileges (making/deleting text channels, roles, permissions, kicking/banning users, etc.) is being abused, or someone high in power is deciding to abuse the power they’ve gained.
The issues you’ll see as a member will include important text/voice channels being deleted, members being kicked (or you being kicked) for no reason, or the mass deletion/creation of new roles within the server.
The most important advice here is to think very carefully about which members have which privileges. If you own a server and don’t think twice about promoting someone to, let’s say, a moderator position, you may very well be opening yourself up to an attack from that member’s account.
If you’re careful about who you grant privileges to, then really the only potential risk is that one of your moderators gets their account hacked. Obviously, you can recommend and encourage people to have strong passwords for their Discord accounts, but there is also another step you can take.
That step would be adding good discord moderation bots to your server that help deter raiding behavior on your server. Some great bots use machine learning among other features to protect servers from suspicious users.
However, a word of caution is to never give bots high permissions since they can sometimes act as a gateway for people to log into your server and abuse those permissions.
It’s also worth mentioning that your account (assuming you’re the server owner) is the biggest potential threat to your own server, since you’re the only one who can potentially give the server to someone else.
The main step you can take is to have a very strong password to reduce the risk of your account being compromised. And it goes without saying, but don’t give your password out to anyone!
To add an extra level of security to your account, Discord also offers 2FA (2-factor authentication), making it extremely difficult for people to be able to hack into your account. If you take all of these steps, you then shouldn’t have to worry at all about your account or server being compromised.
