How Hackers Are Getting Access to Facebook Accounts
When someone has been compromised, it can ruin their reputation and cost thousands of dollars in lost revenue. Dale Berry is the owner of an English preschool in Japan. He was victimized when his Facebook account stolen. Hackers used his account to run fraudulent ads, destroying his business and ruining his reputation.
The hackers first targeted those 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 ask for a password reset code. The hackers then exploit a security feature which lets users add trusted contacts to their account in the event they forget their password. They can request these trusted friends to send them the one-time code to gain access to the account.
Another method hackers can gain access to accounts is to buy stolen login details. A cache of 26 million Amazon, LinkedIn and Facebook passwords was recently found for sale on the dark web. Many of these passwords were stolen by a custom Trojan malware which infected millions of Windows-based computer between 2018 and 2020.
Users can be protected from these attacks by checking that the address bar of their browser is Facebook and not some other website. They should also use the password that combines numbers as well as letters and spaces and never use the same password for other social media or email accounts. They should also monitor their notifications for activity regularly. Twitter for instance, sends out notifications when the user logs into Twitter from a new place or device.
