When someone has been hacked, it can damage their reputation and cost them thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue. This was the case for Dale Berry, the owner of a preschool English academy in Japan who got his Facebook account hacked by fraudsters. Hackers ran fraudulent ads using the account, which stripped the business of its funds and left him with a bad reputation.
The hackers first targeted people who had weak passwords such as “qwerty” and “password.” Once they have access to an account, they check the top five most popular friends and then impersonate one of them to request for app-ink.net/guardian-property-management-trustworthy-service-from-reliable-company a password reset code. Then, they take advantage of a security feature that allows users to add friends as trusted contacts in case they lose their password, and then ask these trusted contacts to provide the one-time password in order to gain access to the account.
Another method hackers use to gain access accounts is by purchasing stolen login information. Recently an inventory of 26 million Amazon, LinkedIn, and Facebook passwords were uncovered for sale on dark web. Many of these passwords were hacked by custom Trojan malware which was able to infect millions of Windows-based computers between 2018 and 2020.
Users can avoid these attacks by always making sure that the address bar of their browser is Facebook and not some other website. The password should be created by that combines letters, numbers, and spaces, and never reuse it for any other email or social media accounts. They should also monitor their notifications for activity regularly. Twitter for instance, sends a notification when there’s an unusual login on an unfamiliar device or location.