Hacking can ruin a person’s reputation and cost them thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue. Dale Berry is the owner of an English preschool in Japan. He was hacked and had his Facebook account stolen. Hackers ran fraudulent ads using his account, which drained his business of cash and left him with a bad reputation.
The hackers first targeted people with weak passwords, such as “qwerty” and “password.” Once they have access to an account, they scan the top five most popular friends and pretend to be one of them and ask for a password reset code. They then make use of a security feature that allows people to add friends as trusted contacts in case they lose their password, and they can request those trusted friends to provide the one-time password in order to gain access to the account.
Another method hackers can gain access to accounts is by purchasing stolen login information. Recently, a cache of 26,000,000 Amazon, LinkedIn, and Facebook passwords were found available on the dark internet. A large portion of these passwords were stolen by custom Trojan malware that caused widespread infection of Windows-based computers between the years 2018 and 2020.
Users can stay safe from these attacks if always ensure whether the address bar in the browser indicates Facebook and not a different website. They should also make sure to use a password that combines numbers spaces, letters and spaces and never duplicate the same password across other social media or email accounts. Additionally they should monitor their activity alerts regularly. Twitter for instance, will notify users when there’s an unusual login from the new device or from a different location.
