When a person is hacked, it can damage their reputation and cost thousands of dollars in lost revenue. This was the case for Dale Berry, the owner of a preschool English academy in Japan who had his Facebook account hacked by scammers. Hackers used his account to run fraudulent ads, draining his business and ruining his reputation.
The hackers first target those who have weak passwords, like “qwerty” or “password.” They then impersonate a friend to request a password reset code. the password. They then take advantage of an option to secure people to add their friends as trusted contacts in case they lose their password and ask trusted friends to provide the one-time password needed to gain access to the account.
Selling stolen login credentials is another way hackers 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 stolen by a custom Trojan malware that was able to infect millions of Windows-based computers between 2018 and 2020.
Users can be protected from these attacks if they always ensure that the address https://www.app-ink.net/ bar on their browser says Facebook and not a different website. Users should use a password comprised of letters, numbers and spaces. Never reuse it for any other email or social media accounts. Additionally users should keep track of their activity notifications frequently. Twitter for instance, will notify users when there’s an unusual login from the new device or from a different location.