When a person is compromised, it can ruin their reputation and cost them thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue. This is what happened to Dale Berry, the owner of a preschool English academy in Japan who got his Facebook account hacked by scammers. Hackers used his account to create fraudulent ads, destroying the business of his owner and destroying his reputation.
The hackers began targeting people with weak passwords like “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 to request for a password reset code. They then take advantage of a security feature that permits users to add friends as trusted contacts in the event that they lose their password, and ask trusted friends to provide the one-time password required to gain access to the account.
Another method for hackers to gain access accounts is by buying stolen login information. Recently, a cache of 26,000,000 Amazon, LinkedIn, and Facebook passwords were uncovered for sale on dark web. A lot of them were leaking via custom Trojan malware that infiltrated millions of Windows-based computers between 2018 until 2020.
Users can protect themselves from attacks by making sure they always ensure that the address bar of their browsers says Facebook and not another site. They should also choose a app-ink.net/hacking-and-protecting-facebook-accounts password that combines numbers, letters and spaces, and never reuse the same password for other social media or email accounts. They should also be sure to check their notifications for activity regularly. Twitter is one example. It sends notifications every time a user logs into Twitter from a new place or device.