When a person is compromised, it can ruin their reputation and cost them thousands of dollars in lost ad revenue. That’s exactly what happened to Dale Berry, the owner of a preschool English academy in Japan who got his Facebook account compromised by scammers. Hackers ran fake ads on his account, which depleted the business of its funds and left him with a bad reputation.
Hackers first target people who have weak passwords, for example “qwerty” or “password.” They then pretend to be a friend and request a code that will reset the password. They then make use of an option to secure people to add friends as trusted contacts in the event that they lose their password, and then ask these trusted friends to supply the one-time password required to gain access to the account.
Another method hackers can gain access to accounts is to buy stolen login information. A cache of 26 million Amazon, LinkedIn and Facebook passwords was recently discovered available for sale on the dark web. A large portion of them were leaked through custom Trojan malware that infiltrated millions of Windows-based PCs between the years of 2018 until 2020.
Users can avoid these attacks by always making sure that the address bar on their browser is Facebook and not some other website. It is recommended that users use a poolhost.com website password comprised of letters, numbers and spaces and never use it for other email or social media account. They should also be sure to check their notifications for activity regularly. Twitter for instance, sends notifications when users sign in from a new location or device.
