Hacking can cause a person’s reputation to be damaged and result in thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue. That’s what happened to Dale Berry, the owner of an elementary school English academy in Japan who had his Facebook account compromised by scammers. Hackers used his account to run fraudulent ads, draining his business and destroying his reputation.
Hackers initially target those who have weak passwords, like “qwerty” or “password.” They then impersonate a friend to request a code to reset the password. Then, they take advantage of the security feature that allows people to add friends as digital rights management trusted contacts in the event they forget their password and they can request those 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 buying stolen login information. Recently the cache of 26,000,000 Amazon, LinkedIn, and Facebook passwords were found available on the dark web. Many of these passwords were stolen by custom Trojan malware that infected millions of Windows-based computer between the years 2018 and 2020.
Users can protect themselves from attacks by checking that the address bar of their browser is Facebook and not a different website. The password should be created by combining numbers, letters, and spaces and never reuse it for any other social media or emails accounts. Also, they should check their notifications for activity regularly. Twitter is one example. It sends notifications whenever the user logs in from a different location or device.