Facebook Hacking: As of 2024, Facebook is the most used social media platform with almost 3 billion monthly active users worldwide. But among this 3 billion people, all are not well know about Cyber Security, and that’s what a hacker takes advantage of. Now this small article can be a very useful as well as powerful weapon or armor for the next possible attack on your or your family’s social accounts.
Why hackers hack social media accounts?
There are a numbers of reasons for which the hackers often targets social media accounts to hack. The reason for hacking into someone’s social accounts varies according to the hacker. In a simple manner, different hackers have different intentions to perform the attack for facebook hacking.
Facebook Hacking – Reasons for hacking social accounts
- Promoting Scams: Scammers often target some famous bodies to promote any scam or misinformation through the social account. Along with that, hackers can also share some malware or phishing sites to target a huge amount of users (followers of that targeted account)
- Spreading misinformation or bad political intension: Focusing on some political interest, hackers also target some famous political individuals to mislead people and earn fake popularity. And just for this reason, if you are engaged in some public sector work or profession, then your account must always be kept secure.
- Selling your personal data: There are a number a hackers targeting a huge number of users to steal all the personal information of the individuals, like phone numbers, email addresses, residential addresses, common interests, chats, etc. and sell them in the Dark Web for a huge amount of money. The data gathered by the buyers are then used by scammers to promote scams, get fake loans, and sometimes some popular companies also use them to show relative advertisements to those users.
- Human Trafficking and Blackmailing: Attackers also hack into the targeted persons’ accounts to get more in depth knowledge about that user to make him or her a victim of human trafficking. And along with that hackers also tries to blackmail those users, whose personal as well as sensitive data are collected by the hacker, for a massive amount of ransom.
There are also some cases registered regarding this Facebook hacking, or other social media hacking, in which a boyfriend also tries to hack into his girlfriend’s social accounts just to see what she is doing always being online.
How Hackers Hack Social Media Accounts?
How to hack Facebook accounts? Well! there are a number of hacking technics or attacks, by which the hacker can get someone’s login credentials, and once he get that, he can do whatever he wants with that account.
Password Attacks in Facebook Hacking
A password attack is a type of hacking attack in which the attacker gathers some possible passwords that the targeted person may use, these passwords can contain some common passwords that have already been cracked or come to know, and some possible combination of numbers, letters and special characters. Mainly this password list focuses on the behavior and the interest of the victim which has already been gathered by the attacker – called information gathering.
Now once the hacker completes gathering the passwords, he then use that password list or wordlist in a password attacking tool and starts a bruteforce attack to check whether any of the password from the list matches with the users original password.
And if any of those password matches, then congratulations to the hacker, the account is successfully hacked.
How To Counter Password Attacks?
In facebook hacking or other social media hacking, password attacks play a vital role in finding out the actual password of the targeted person. So it becomes a very important security tip to counter this attack. Down here I’ve prepared all the possible technics for making this attack a failure.
- It becomes very difficult to crack a long password, even premium hacking tools can’t find out your password if it is 8 to 12 characters long.
- But using a long password, without any proper combination does not make it difficult at all. We need to combine all the letters, numbers and special character in a proper way.
- And remember, capital and small letter combination plays a very important role in this.
- Do not ever use any word that can be found on Dictionary.
- We should not use the same password for different social accounts, and also we must regularly keep changing our passwords.
Phishing Attack in Social Media Hacking
Facebook Phishing Attack? So Phishing Attack can be defined as a hacking attack that tricks the targets to enter their login details, credit card details, etc. on a fake website (phishing site) that looks almost same as the authentic one.
Let’s take an example of Facebook Hacking, hacker can design a clone of facebook.com, but this time, the address of the server and also the database will not the same as the real Facebook servers. So once anyone visit that fake page and enters his or her login details to login to Facebook, then within a second, all the information will be sent to the hacker, and he then can access the account using the credentials. And that’s a phishing attack in a simple manner.
If you are thinking, this attack can only be performed by a pro hacker, then you are wrong! All the free GitHub tools and other free tools make this a very simple and easy task for hackers. Because, in these tools, there are a list of social sites which are already cloned making them similar to the real ones. And using some free services like NGROK, noobs can also host these phishing sites and can perform this attack in Facebook Hacking or other social media account hacking. So always be careful and aware of this fact.
How To Counter A Phishing Attack?
Want to be safe from Phishing Attack? Great! Learning all the Cyber Security technics to be safe from all the cyber criminals is a perfect decision. Because most of the people ignore these threats, and becomes a victim.
Now there are a few steps that you can follow to prevent these attacks. And you always need to be aware of it. Do not click on any suspicious link blindly; first investigate the URL.
- Check the protocol whether it is HTTP or HTTPS, and if it is HTTP, then try to avoid clicking on it, but if you still want to click, then use a VPN connection, and never share or enter any details there.
- Again if it is HTTPS, you can visit the site, an HTTPS tag tells us that the information shared between you and the site, is encrypted and secure, no third person can see it. But there are also some hacking tools that can also decrypt encrypted data . So use all websites carefully.
- Check the domain name properly, whether it is authentic or not. Because a domain is a unique property, and no one can reuse it. Fake domains will definitely have spelling errors.
- Check domain extensions, whether it is one among the popular domain extensions like .com, .in, .net, .org, .gov, .co, etc. [Facebook or other social sites mostly uses .com and .in]
- And at last scan the URL before clicking on it on these URL Scanners – Virus Total, URL Void, URL Scan
Social Engineering Attack in Hacking
What is a social engineering attack in Facebook hacking? So talking about this attack, According to me this is the simplest but most dangerous hacking attack probably. And in this attack hackers use some tricky cheating kind of method to trick his or her victims to make them click on any phishing link or to make them reveal their information by themselves.
Don’t think that the hacker will text you as “please bro please click on the link”, instead, the attacker will find out all about his victim’s interests and according to those interests, he or she start sending them a kind of offer or something like this. And based on the interest of the targeted person, hackers also creates some new scams or something like that which best attracts the target.
Now this attack is mostly combined with a phishing attack. For example, most of the hackers are targeting YouTube channels, in which they offer the creators a huge amount of money for promoting a simple product or website through their video, and if a creator accept that offer then definitely his channel will no longer be with him.
How To Counter Social Engineering Attack?
Social Engineering attacks mainly works psychologically. I mean the hackers attack psychologically first, and once his target is manipulated, he then can start his technical attack. And talking about the security steps that you can follow to not being a victim of this social engineering attack are as follows:
- Never follow any promotional or sponsorship mail or offer blindly.
- Never join on any community or group of pirated contents.
- Never use any third party applications or MOD APKs.
- Never trust anyone blindly in case of technical security. Never share OTPs, or Passwords with others.
- Money is the most common technic that has always been an idea for making this attacks successful.
Conclusions on Facebook Hacking – CyberTips
Hackers can hack into your account with for any reason, and sometimes they do not have any reason to do it, they just do it. And whatever the reason is, our main focus should always be to protect our accounts. Because, there are more than hundred million of cyber attack cases registered, and the number is still increasing. And most of them are social media account hacking, especially Facebook hacking.
How To Prevent Facebook Hacking?
Use the following technics to prevent your Facebook account from being hacked.
- Use a strong and long password. You can also take help from the online password generator tools to generate a highly secured password.
- Use Two-Factor Authorization on all your social accounts. There are also some authenticator application available on google play store for using 2-factor authorization.
- And keep changing your passwords regularly in a period of time.
- Never install any third party application as well as MOD application. Only use applications form Google Play Store and always keep updating all your installed applications.
- Never click on any suspicious link or URL, because it can also be a malicious link. So investigate a link properly before clicking on it.
- Always be aware of Social Engineering Tectics.
- Keep rechecking your privacy settings on your social accounts.
- Regularly monitor login and other activities on your social accounts. And report any suspicious activity immediately.
That’s all! these are my thoughts on this topic. If I missed anything, please let me know in the comment section below. Thank You.