By Bello Abdulkudus Onuchi
Facebook is a free social networking site with millions of users, which allow you to connect and share with family and friends. Facebook has very strong security but users fall victims of account hacking because of trust they have for strangers, friends and family over the internet.
Major causes of Facebook hacking:
- Using easy guess or weak password like 123456, abcdef, john, blue, etc.
- Writing your password on a piece of paper.
- Visiting untrusted sites.
- When you log in with peoples phone.
- Using your names, phone number, favourite colour, date of birth (etc) as a password.
- Using phone keyboards that pop up keys struck.
How hackers gain access to your account:
- Through social engineering: an attacker will try all possible ways to trick you in other to reveal sensitive information like password.
- Through a phishing website: an attacker will clone Facebook site and send you a link to visit the site, where password and username are required if you input your details they will use it to login Facebook original site and change your password.
- Through keyloggers: when you download an application from a less secured site, it may have an attachment which secretly installs on your computer or phone without your knowledge, therefore capturing all your keys struck on a keyboard and send them to the hacker.
- Through password guessing: an attacker guesses password to authenticate the user to the system.
- Through brute force attack: an attacker repeatedly inputs different passwords until he gets the original password.
Why I cant recover my password after being hacked?
When hackers finally have access to your account with your password, they delete your phone number and email you used to open the account and input a new phone number and email.
How can I protect my account from an attacker?
- Use a strong password which consists of numbers, alphabets, uppercase, lowercase and special characters e.g @AbDuL82
- Set your facebook USE-2 FACTOR-AUTHENTICATION: so that anytime someone wants to log in with your username and password from a new browser or device a security code will be requested, facebook will send One time password to your phone number for verification. Without the OTP the hacker cannot access your account.
- Set “GET ALERT ABOUT UNRECOGNISED LOGINS” this will alert you when an attacker tried to access your account with a new device or browser. So that you can log in and change your password fast.
- Never save your password on another person phone.
- Do not use keyboards that pop up each keypress.
- Never visit direct links you receive from strangers on facebook e.g online voting, job offer, work from home offer, online auction e.t.c
- Always type the website link, check website spellings or do a Google search for the official website
- Keep your password in a secure vault.
Always visit: www.cybersecurity.provarex.com
FEEL FREE TO ASK ANY QUESTION.