How to Prevent a Facebook Hack

Once you have mitigated the damage from the Facebook attack, it is time to prevent a recurrence. It’s useful to first understand how your account was “hacked” in the first place. The two most common ways that the attacker gained access to your credentials are:

How a Hacker Compromised Your Account

1) You gave them to the attacker. You may have received a malicious message from a “hacked” account belonging to one of your friends, clicked the link, and been deceived by a fake login page.

2) You were using the same username and password combination for your Facebook account that you use on other sites. Your credentials for the other site were compromised, and the attacker simply tried them on Facebook and got lucky.

How to Prevent Further Attacks

If you unwittingly gave the attacker your credentials (option 1), then the fix to prevent recurrence is easy: Don’t click on links in messages. But since you probably will anyway, at least heed this important rule: Never, ever enter a username and password into a website that appears after you click a link. 

If your account was compromised because you re-used credentials, consider this a wakeup call to start practicing better cyber hygiene in your life. Get yourself a password vault to facilitate using long, strong and unique passwords for all of your online accounts. You can read all about the goodness of password vaults in my article here: https://www.badgerinfosec.com/blog/do-this-now-password-vaults