Hacking can ruin a person’s reputation and cost them thousands in lost advertising revenue. Dale Berry is the owner of an English preschool in Japan. He was victimized when his Facebook account hacked. Hackers posed as legitimate ads on his account, which depleted his business of money and left him with a damaged reputation.

The hackers first targeted people with weak passwords, such as “qwerty” and “password.” Once they have access to an account, they look at the top five most popular friends and impersonate one of them to ask for a password reset code. The hackers then exploit the security feature that allows people to add trusted contacts to their account in case they forget their password. They can ask their trusted friends to give them the unique code that allows them to gain access to the account.

Another method hackers can gain access to accounts is by buying stolen login details. A cache of 26 million Amazon, LinkedIn and Facebook passwords was recently found available on the dark web. Many of these passwords were taken by a custom Trojan malware which affected millions of Windows-based computers between 2018 and 2020.

Users can be protected from these attacks by making sure that the virtual data room for business address bar of their browser is Facebook and not some other website. Users should create a password combining numbers, letters, and spaces. They should not use it on other email or social media accounts. They should also monitor their notifications regularly for activity. Twitter for instance sends notifications every time users log into the account from a new location or device.