During the pandemic scam, spam, trolling and phishing became rampant and hackers had been continuously attacking users across different social media platforms to be used as distribution and attack vectors. Facebook, instagram and youtube accounts are the ones mostly attacked and used by this hackers. And even one of the known online media network which is ABS CBN fall victim to it.
The ultimate reason why social media accounts are hacked is to be used as distribution vectors for fake news, phishing sites and any other malicious content. So as a user we should always take care of our account and make it private as much as possible so that you will not be used by anyone to share their bullshit. Remember conveying fake news and any other malicious content will put you into jail unless you prove that you are hacked and that is hard to prove in any court specially here in the Philippines.
So let us start on making our account secure in any platform that we are using. So what we should do?
- Make all personal information private, like your birthday, home address, even your pet’s name you have to make it private, and even your pictures as much as possible you keep it to yourself or make it visible only to your trusted friends.
- Use a strong password, don’t ever use your birthday, pet’s name, parents name or any word that can be easily searched on your personal data and off course in dictionary, you can actually use online password generators to generate a strong password, just like what we have here: https://passwordsgenerator.net/
- Activate 2 Factor Authentication to any of your account, and use a phone number that you trust the most and not being used by anybody else beside you. And make sure that you set it to always require 2FA when logging in.
- Never let anyone borrow your account even if it is your wife or husband, because you might be security and privacy aware, they might not be like you and at some point they will accidentally make your account compromised.
- If using open login features of your account to other platforms like games, make sure that it is legit and real site of theirs, or just to be secured don’t use it at all, create a different email account and use it for your games and 3rd party applications.
You can also watch this video for tips on securing your account specifically your Facebook Account this is in Tagalog.
But what if your account is already hacked, and what can you do to solve it, so here are the following that you can do:
- You can contact the platform, lets say it is facebook you can follow the recommendations on this link: https://www.facebook.com/help/hacked and work around with it, but in this process it will be somewhat confusing if you are not techy enough.
- Another option you can do is contact a person who can do it for you for a small fee, but if you are to follow this step just make sure you can trust the person you want to work with and make sure they have good reputation because what you are letting them to check and get into is your personal account, and once they unlock it will expose your private information to them. So be careful with whom to work with.
In relation to number 2 of the list above, some of you may ask if I can recommend a person who can do it, or a person I can trust that you can also trust. Let me introduce to you one of our fellow in our team who handles account recovery.
He is Renz Aggabao of Isabela who retrieved several accounts in Facebook including some well known influencers and vloggers. After retrieval he follows the following 3 rules:
- Unlock and focus on removing attack vectors
- Secure and enhance privacy settings
- Secure handover to the account owner
From that he also make sure that any private data, information and or content will not be exposed as part of his moral responsibility. If you want to contact him you can find his page in Facebook, Instagram and Youtube.
So after reading this article, you may now want to go to your account and start securing them and prevent from being a victim, because even if we have the best retrievers around there are hacks that makes your account irretrievable. So again let us secure our account, make it private and have a better experience in our digital life.
