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Facebook Account Hacking and What You Should NOT be Doing to Avoid it

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As many of you know, I've written extensively over the years to explain how your Facebook Profile or commercial Facebook Page gets hacked. Far too often users blame Facebook itself as a social media platform.
Ask yourself, would you leave the front door of your house wide open or unlocked if you went to the supermarket or were at work all day? Would you happily give a complete stranger personal details of your bank account, various passwords, and security clearance details? The instinctive answer might well be - absolutely not!
And yet millions of people - using Facebook and other social media platforms - the world over, do exactly this every single day without realising it. And when they do get hacked or a personal account is breached, they cry foul at the social media platform or financial institute. Instead they should actually be examining their online digital footprint and activities.
With the holiday Thanksgiving period just passed, and Christmas on the way, more people will have time off work and this is when their online and social media activity shoots up. It's also a time when many people are caught off their guard, looking for enjoyment, interaction and fun. The extended pandemic has also seen a huge increase in hacking, phishing and money scams. It's been a real boon for unscrupulous people.
Remember, everything you do on social media can be tracked and exploited if you choose/insist on sharing personal information in a public space. And that includes everything from posting publicly from your Facebook (and other) profile account, to commenting information about yourself on other profiles and pages that appear on your newsfeed.
Quizzes, pick-one-of-these, what's-your-favourite..., your-cartoon-character-is-the-last-place-you-holidayed etc. You get it? While some of these can be harmless, many are not. There are devised and run by what we call dataminers. No... they aren't looking for oil, gas or gold. They are datamining YOUR information and digital footprint. And I can assure you that data is more valuable to the unscrupulous than oil.
I've previously written about how precisely datamining farms work. And their data produce can be pretty varied. It could be something as innocuous as a targeted marketing list, or it could be something more sinister like a database of people/profiles and their birth dates, first pet's name, favourite colour, mother's maiden name, school nickname, place of residence, email address, the time of year you like to holiday, whether you use Apple or Android devices. I could go on. But can you start to see how valuable that data is when used for unscrupulous reasons?
Think about the above this way and ask yourself - how useful would the above data be, at their fingertips? to say:
- Someone who uses phishing link software targeted at iPhone users
- A burglar living in your locale knowing you always go on holidays the last week in August
- Someone who has hacked your profile, knows what bank you use, and has the answers to security questions banks often request when you've forgotten a password or the email associated with the account
We've all had those unsolicited phone calls from 'support centres' saying there is a virus on your computer that needs fixing, you are due a refund from Amazon, or someone is fraudulently using your social security number and you will be arrested if you don't cooperate and provide further personal information during the investigation.
Where and how do you think these scammers got your contact information and know things about you that might put you off guard and get duped into a scam? A high percentage of the public will often answer: 'Oh, yeh, stupid banks, Facebook, the government health department must have got hacked and got hold of my data.' While those breaches do happen, it's actually more likely the data came directly from YOU, happily sharing (inadvertently) personal data online through public quizzes, answering questions via comments, answering questions to win an iPhone or a car from a radio station you've never heard of, but willingly participated or even signed up to. That data was farmed, correlated with other datamining bases and sold for money to other unscrupulous people and companies.
Take a read of the following article from the Digital Docs.
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