Wednesday, March 16, 2022

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.


15 comments:

  1. I've had the FB hack and did what you said. And several friends apparently have it happen again and again. Sorry it happened to you, and thanks for the good advice. I once had a friend who followed some kind of list of different passwords...he kept a folder of them! I do have a list to go to, but need to change some that are used on my computer. Life is now full of passwords!

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  2. What a hassle, but at least you were informed, and gained a whole lot more useful advice along the way. I have several passwords, and a special way to remember them.

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  3. I don't have a FB account. I already spend a lot of time blogging. :)

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  4. When covid started I just ignored Facebook for about a year. These days I'll spend maybe five or ten minutes a day on it.

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  5. Good advice!
    Too many websites want people to sign in with their Facebook or Google account. Sharing increases vulnerability.

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  6. My Facebook account was hacked twice years ago and both times it was because I had accepted a friend request. I don't accept friend requests anymore unless I know for sure it is legitimate. If you have a friend on Facebook then receive another friend request from that same person....beware!! The hacker who hacked me had a money scheme going on trying to get money out of my friends saying I needed the money. #%!!*@#!

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  7. Very good advice. I tend not to post anything important on FB and now that my grandson is older, I try to share photos (with his mom's permission) that don't show his face head on. So far, I haven't been hacked (knock wood) and always use a different password for FB than I do for other sites. Guess I've been lucky.

    Spring is showing itself here too. It was above freezing this afternoon, the melting has started in earnest, and my street is now a mess of slush and water. Of course, it will freeze tonight. :) Enjoy the nice weather!

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  8. Many have had their FB accts hacked. I am not one of them, but I did have my email hacked once.

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  9. Great advice. My twitter account was hacked twice. I didn't see what was posted but twitter said it was inappropriate . I ended up changing my pass word twice.

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  10. Thanks for the good advice. I have a FB account but rarely post anything. I use it to keep in touch with far away friends and relatives.

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  11. I've never touched Facebook, and nothing you've said here encourages me to change my mind!

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  12. I am happy not to use Facebook and I am quite sure that I never will.

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  13. For a number of reasons I have not ever had, nor will I ever have, a facebook account. That's a problem at times since there are a number of governmental accounts that can't be accessed if you don't have a facebook account. So I just do without access to some interesting information.

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  14. i have a Facebook but i don't share information on it anymore, personal reasons. i LOVE Facebook as it keeps me up to date on festivals, fireworks, concerts and things like that year round. so many of the events we visit i would not know about if it weren't for Facebook...so i don't think fb is a waste of time!!

    changing passwords is such a hassle to me, i hate having to look them up all the time!!

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