When someone has been hacked, it can damage their reputation and cost thousands of dollars in ad revenue. Dale Berry is the owner of an English preschool in Japan. He had his Facebook account stolen. Hackers made use of his account to run fraudulent ads, draining his business and ruining his reputation.
The hackers initially targeted users who had weak passwords such as “qwerty” and “password.” Once they have access to an account, they look at the top five most popular friends and pretend to be one of them and ask for the password reset code. They then make use of a security feature that allows users to add friends as trusted contacts in the event they lose their password and can ask those trusted contacts to provide the one-time password needed to gain 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 found for sale on the dark web. A large portion of these passwords were hacked by a custom Trojan malware that infected millions of Windows-based computer between 2018 and 2020.
Users can avoid these attacks if they make sure whether the address bar in their browser is Facebook and not another website. They should also make sure to use a password that is composed of numbers as well as letters and spaces and never reuse the same password for other social media or email accounts. In addition they should monitor their activity notifications regularly. Twitter for instance sends out notifications when users log in from a new location or device.
