I have heard a lot of people complaining about their Facebook account or Instagram account being taken from them in one way or the other. This can be very painful when an account you have been building for a long time got snatched from you without you being able to do anything about it, especially an Instagram account after gathering a lot of followers in it. Aside from followers, this account may contain sensitive information about you, information in your conversations with someone. By losing your Facebook or Instagram accounts to unknown people, you have also exposed your privacy to someone you don’t know.
What can possibly happen when your social media account is hacked?
There are a lot of things that can go wrong in your life that you might not be aware of if you lost your social media account. Below are some of the things that can happen when you lost your account.
1. Privacy invasions: aside from the normal public posts and stories that we share on social media, there are other things that you do with your account that are not public and you will never want them to be public. One of the most important private sections of your social media account is your private messages between you and your friends or loved ones. In those messages, you might have to share some sensitive information that you don’t want anyone else to see apart from the person you have that conversation with.
2. Access to other of your online accounts: for example When someone gets access to your Facebook account and successfully logs you out, if the account was hacked using your correct password then you should know that your other social media accounts are already in danger if you used thesame or similar passwords. If the person is intelligent, he can also think of tracking other of your online logins to try with the same password to see if he or she can have access and this will be possible so long as you used thesame or similar passwords.
3. Using your account to commit a crime: This is one of the worst things that can happen to you when your account is hijacked by someone and the person uses it to commit a crime without removing your information such as your pictures and bio from your profile. The person can use your face on the account to scam those in your followers or friend list. Some of them might fall victim to it thinking it’s you that is behind the account. That’s why you must strongly protect your account especially if you are a public figure.
That brings us to the next section of this article.
How to Protect your account from hijackers
You may have lost your social media account before and you don’t want it to repeat itself again, worry not. If you can read this article to the end, you will be able to protect all your social media accounts from hijackers.
Here in this post, I will show you how you can protect your account from being hijacked.
There are many ways to protect your account from hijackers and I want you to get ready as I explore all the methods that can help you to protect your social media account from being hijacked.
Here are the things that you must do to help you secure your account.
1. Always log out of your email whenever it’s logged into any public devices such as public computers. If your email is attached to your social media handle, it can be easily hacked when someone gets access to your email because the person is going to use the email request for password reset and he or she can easily reset your account with the help of your email.
2. Don’t use any information that is publicly displayed in your profile as a password. For example, a name that’s displayed in your profile or your phone number because this is one of the methods they can use to get you away from your social media account.
3. Set two-factor authentication on your account: in case you don’t know much about what two factors authentication means, it is one feature that’s available for you to protect your social media account from being hacked. Two factors authentication is the second security layer that you will need to bypass to confirm that you are the real owner of the account you are about to access. What this two factor authentication do is; after you have entered your account login details correctly, a one-time password will be sent to you via either your phone number or email that you will have to provide before you can be granted access to the account you are trying to access.
4. Attach a valid email to your account: this is one thing that some people don’t take seriously in their social media accounts. When you create your social media account, let’s take for example a Facebook account without an email, Facebook will ask you to enter an email address that can be used to recover your account when you lost it. At this point any email you submit will be used as the primary email and that can’t be easily changed. It’s that email that can help you to reset your password anytime you sense that someone is tempering with any of your social media accounts.
Conclusion
Your social media account can be taken from you if care is not taken especially when you are a public figure or you used your account for business and it’s fast-growing. You might be wondering why people hack into other people’s account, well there are many reasons for doing so of which may not be known to you. So you should take caution and protect your account before you become a victim.
Hope this article is helpful to you. Please if there are any questions concerning this article let us know in the comment section.
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