Help, I’m Hacked

Graeme Watkins of the Graeme Watkins Project joined Facebook when it first emerged. The he entered Idols South Africa and ended up taking 3rd place in Season 5 of the MNet Show. After his success, and forming his popular band, he started a new Facebook account for his work.

Over the years, his career and personal life merged and he started using just the one Facebook Page to communicate with his friends and fans. His first account lay dormant – or so he thought.

A hacker had got hold of his account and started sending messages to his Facebook Following, and even went as far as threatening Graeme and wife. Below is his story…  

When your Facebook is hacked, someone now has access to all your contact as well as private messages, so make sure you change your Facebook password from time to time. 

Sometimes it’s not an actual person that’s randomly hacked into your account. You may have granted access to a malicious application which now hijacks your account. 

Hackers also apparently exploit things that are most popular so they’ll use various methods to get you to provide your personal login details.

As Facebook becomes more popular, websites, blogs and even big businesses are incorporating the Facebook button on their pages – but that’s assuming the link is authentic. 

Hackers can camouflage a false Facebook login page by making bit look like an authentic share button. And if you click on this button you’ll be handing over your details to a hacker. 

So to avoid this, you should first log onto Facebook on separate browsing window. Then in a new tab visit other sites and if they have a Facebook share button that asks for a Facebook log in, it’s not real 

Authentic buttons that are plugged into Facebook API (Application Programming Interface) will recognize that you are already authenticated and automatically post 

Happy surfing!

Catch up with Terence Pillay via Twitter @terencepillay1

Information from www.makeuseof.com 

In case you missed The Good Bad and Ugly this morning and the interview with Graeme Watkins  - take a listen: