Ten years ago, I couldn’t care less about Facebook. In fact, I didn’t even want to join it, I didn’t understand how it worked and I found no use in it. My best friend made me sign up, so I did, and my account remained unused for months until someone told me that you could play games. So I started to use my Facebook account, joining games and eventually I was hooked.
Fast forward 9 years later and I am still hooked. What I didn’t expect was waking up one morning, brewing myself a cup of coffee and opening my Facebook page to see I was locked out of my own account. My password wouldn’t work; in fact, it was changed. I quickly went about getting a new password sent to my email, which allowed me to log in, only to find that my Facebook account had been hacked. Call the police, call the mayor, call my neighbours, nothing would help me now, because seemingly all the hackers did was go through my messages and post some scam link to all of my friends. No biggy, as my friends are smart enough to know that I wouldn’t send any messages like and so they simply deleted the suspicious looking message. Then It hit me, they know who I am and where I am. They have accessed my page, seen my personal information and now I was being watched by criminal eyes. My Facebook account hacked, I felt vulnerable and scared.
I apologized to everyone on my friends list and I upgraded my PC’s security. Soon enough I had calmed down and eventually go on with Facebook activity after the incident; until one day I was going through my apps, and saw a couple of dubious looking apps that I certainly didn’t download.
There is nothing an app can do to harm me, is there? I’m afraid there is…
The apps downloaded had taken not only my personal information and continued to submit my information and updates to the hacker, but took a few of my friends down with me! Panic spread, we had to control the situation, so I contacted Facebook, told them again that I had my Facebook account hacked and eventually got the matter resolved. Thinking it was all over, I was much more careful with my personal information and didn’t post as often as I did before.
Then came the third wave, a duplicate profile to mine popped up, same name, same pictures, same posts, but in between all of my cute cat posts and silly meme’s were those suspicious looking links. The hackers had hijacked my identity and used it to do their evil bidding.
My face, my name, my personal information was being used as a ploy to entice hundreds of unwitting people to be scammed into all sorts of things. My Facebook account hacked months before, was only now showing its true criminal potential. I had to put a final end to this madness.
Contacting Facebook again they finally purged my account from all hacker’s apps, codes and whatever else was hidden. My Facebook account was hacked, there were hidden threats to my safety, my identity and the safety of my friends.
What can you do to prevent your Facebook account from being hacked?
- Be very careful of what apps or programs you download on Facebook and in general
- Never give your log in details to anyone
- Never log on to private accounts (Facebook, Gmail etc) when using a shared PC
- Always use a good security program to protect any device that connects to the web
- Never open suspicious looking emails or respond to unsolicited private messages that look out of the norm
- Avoid taking tests or allowing access to programs on Facebook that might access your profile information or post on your behalf.
Those are just a few rules that you should follow to help prevent your Facebook account being hacked.