My Facebook Account was Hacked!

Now I'm sure many of you don't waste your time on Facebook at all, but I must confess to enjoying it - mainly because I'm a member of the Grey-Bruce Photography group, the Beaver Valley Birding group, and the Bruce Trail Hiking group, as well as one that give me local news of Meaford.  So I get a continuous feed of interesting pictures.  The best way not to get hacked though, is certainly not to use it at all!

I got several messages from friends suggesting it had been hacked, and finally a call from my BIL made me think I'd better do something.  Then Facebook itself emailed me to see they'd had the problem reported and were working on it.  So of course I googled 'What do I do  if my Facebook account has been hacked?'

Well I learned a good deal in the process of fixing the problem, and I thought some of it was worth repeating here.

I should note that the hacker of my account had created a separate Facebook page purporting to be mine, but the login was slightly different.  And if I looked closely I realized almost all the pictures had not been taken by myself, though a number of pictures were of me, or of the waterfalls on the Stew Hilts Side Trail, a falls that by default is coming to be known as 'Stew Hilts Falls'!  Most pictures I simply did not recognize.

The hacker did send out messages to some of my Facebook friends, but these were not malicious messages, nor were there any nude pix.  There was nothing malicious posted on the alternate page.

So here is the advice I found.

1. First, change your password, preferably to something strong, a password with at least one each of capital letters, numbers, symbols, and lower case letters, in total at least 10 digits long.  The trick is to come up with something meaningless to anyone else but easy to remember for yourself.

2. Don't post anything important on Facebook anyway, any important information, or any pictures of children (although this latter one is a choice, clearly it means a lot to some parents).  If you choose to do so, be sure they're not pictures that could ever be used on a child abuse website, and think about what your 12 year-old will say about their baby pictures when their classmates have found them on your Facebook page ten years from now!

3. One of the reasons Facebook is so dangerous is that often apps you choose to load on your phone give you the choice of creating yet another password or simply accessing it via Facebook.  This in turn means a successful hacker would have access to those apps, so be careful.  I have therefore decided to have a strong but memorable-to-me password for Facebook, but a simpler password that I use repeatedly for other unimportant sites that still demand passwords.

4. Protect your email and banking passwords above all, and be sure they are strong.  Those two are where a hacker could do the most damage.

They say you should change your passwords every 2-3 months.  So far I'm not likely to do that.  The next step up would be to use the first letters of phrases as passwords, and above that they say to use a Password Manager software.  I'm very hesitant to do that simply because I don't want to introduce something I don't personally understand. In the meantime I will stumble on.

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It's certainly feeling like spring around here.  March here is the month when we move from all snow cover to none or very little, so the changes are coming fast now.  We heard a Cardinal singing for the first time yesterday, one of the distinctive sounds of spring here.  And we went for a nice drive today; the countryside is waking up.  The temperature is up to 8°C (46F) today.