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QUINCY, ILL. -- It used to be you had to be careful what links you clicked while surfing the internet.

Now you have to be careful where you move your mouse.

Recently both Facebook and Twitter were hacked into by spammers in an attempt for people to try and make money.

Everytime you rolled your mouse over a certain link, a survey would pop up.

Those behind the survey would make a dollar for every survey that was filled out.

One group actually earned more than $485,000 in a single day.

This KHQA Safe Family report shows you what to watch for while your hanging out on social media websites.

Things can happen so quickly while you're on line, it's hard to stay proactive. Just remember this Facebook alone has 500 million plus users, so people who are trying to make a quick buck off of you know this is the place to hang out. Facebook says this particular problem has been fixed, and it wasn't anything malicious.

"From what I've read, it will only be an annoyance. But that's today's news. Tomorrow's news is it will be more than an annoyance. It may try to identify personal information on your computer or personal information from your account and take that data and do what it needs to do," says Eric Thomas with ETC Computerland.

That's why it's important to keep your anti-virus up to date and also if you're a Windows user, make sure you accept any Windows updates that pop up.

"There are also pieces of software out there to detect, prevent, eliminate what's called malware or bad software. That is sometimes automatically installed on your computer," says Thomas.

Here's a link to some software recommended by ETC Computerland: www.malwarebytes.org. Here are some other ways to protect yourself on Facebook.

"One is be friends with only the people your friends with. If you don't know someone, don't accept their friend invitation. It's not a popularity contest," says Thomas.

Also familiarize yourself with Facebook's privacy and security settings. They tend to change a lot without you knowing, so check them often. Also be careful of the applications you download within Facebook, and be leary of any ads. And remember the old adage, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Another idea is to download a third party program such as Tweetdeck, and there are several to choose from.

Those types of programs import social media posts and put it all on one place.

That type of program could prevent some of those spam attacks since it has its own interface.