Hacking can ruin a person’s reputation and cost them thousands in lost advertising revenue. Dale Berry is the owner of an English preschool in Japan. He was victimized when his Facebook account stolen. Hackers made use of his account to run fraudulent ads, draining his business and destroying his reputation.
The hackers first targeted people with weak passwords, such as “qwerty” and “password.” Once they have access to an account, they look at the top five most well-known friends and impersonate one of them and ask for a password reset number. They then take advantage of a security feature that permits people to add their friends as trusted contacts in the event that they forget their password and ask trusted friends to provide the one-time password to regain access to the account.
Purchase of stolen login information is another method hackers can gain access. A cache of 26 million Amazon, LinkedIn and Facebook passwords was recently discovered available for sale on the dark web. A large portion of these passwords were taken by a custom Trojan malware that infected millions of Windows-based computer between the years of 2018 and 2020.
Users can be protected from these attacks by checking that the address bar on their browser is Facebook and not some other website. They should also make sure to use a password that is composed of numbers, letters and spaces, and never use the same password for other email or social media accounts. Additionally users should keep track of their activity notifications frequently. Twitter, for example, sends a notification when there’s a suspicious he has a good point login from the new device or from a different location.