Houghton social media experts advise how to prevent Facebook account hacking

HOUGHTON, Mich. (WLUC) - With a rise in Facebook accounts being targeted by hackers, the need to protect your information is as important as ever.

But why are hackers trying to hijack your account? Marketing Department Inc.’s David Sim tells us why.

“There’s a couple of reasons,” said Sim. “One is that if they really want to do something bad, they’ll take that information and use it to try to gain access to your bank accounts. Most of the time what happens to your individual data is it gets sold. That information is just sold off to other groups.”

Hackers generally manage this by tricking users into giving up personal information through phishing scams or emails marked “urgent.” They are also able to gain access by taking advantage of a user’s credential stuffing, as explained by Michigan Tech University’s Dave Hale.

“People have a lot of passwords out there, a lot of credentials,” said Hale. “And they tend to reuse them for sites, especially for things like social media sites where they may not put as much importance on it as they do their bank accounts.”

Avoiding using the same passwords for multiple accounts is a great place to start avoiding hackers. There are secure password manager programs that keep track of them all, which MTU’s Haley Goodreau says is especially useful.

“It’s hard to remember all of these social platform passwords, oftentimes because you have a handful of them, and you don’t always know, especially when using a long phrase,” said Goodreau.

A two-step verification method is also highly effective when signing into Facebook.

“Even if they have your credentials and sign in there, they can’t get that code that is going to your phone,” continued Hale. “For the most part, that is the most effective method you’re going to have out there to protect any single account that you have.”

These defenses can also be applied to other social media and online accounts.

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