When a person is compromised, it can ruin their reputation and cost thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue. Dale Berry is the owner of an English preschool in Japan. He was victimized when his Facebook account stolen. Hackers ran fake ads on the account, which stripped his business of funds and left him with a bad reputation.

The hackers initially targeted users who had weak passwords like “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 to request for the password reset code. The hackers then use an option to protect themselves that allows users to add trusted contacts to their account in case they forget their password. They can request these trusted friends to provide the one-time password to gain access to the account.

Buying stolen login information is another way hackers gain access. A cache of 26 million Amazon, LinkedIn and Facebook passwords was recently discovered available on the dark web. Many of these passwords were hacked by custom Trojan malware which affected millions of Windows-based computers between 2018 and 2020.

Users can be protected from these attacks if they always check that the address bar in their browser is Facebook and not another website. They should also make sure to use an account password that includes numbers spaces, letters and spaces and never reuse the same password on other email or social media accounts. Also, they should check their notifications for activity regularly. Twitter is one example. It sends notifications every time users sign in from a different location or device.

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