When someone has been victimized, it could 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 compromised by fraudsters. Hackers ran fake ads on his account, which drained his business of money and left him with a damaged reputation.
The hackers began targeting people with weak passwords, such as “qwerty” and “password.” Once they have access to an account, they scan the top five most popular friends and then impersonate one of them to ask for a password reset number. They then take advantage of the security feature that allows people to add friends as trusted contacts in case they lose their password, and then ask these trusted friends to provide the one-time password needed 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 found for sale on the dark web. A large portion of these passwords were stolen by custom Trojan malware which affected millions of Windows-based computers between the years of 2018 and 2020.
Users can protect themselves from attacks by making sure that the address bar on their browser is Facebook and not some other website. It is also recommended to use the password that combines numbers spaces, letters, and spaces and never reuse the same password for other email or social media accounts. Additionally, they should check their activity alerts regularly. Twitter, for example, sends out notifications when https://www.app-ink.net/secure-data-room-provides-exceptional-benefits-inside-the-company there’s an unusual login from an unfamiliar device or location.