What to do if your Facebook page gets hacked
In light of the recent Facebook hacking of the UNSW brand page, George Photios outlines what to do if your page gets hacked and how you can prevent it from occurring.
The attack on UNSW’s Facebook page over the weekend, presumably timed to coincide with its Open Day, is just the latest in a spate of cyber attacks on the world’s biggest social media platform.
While it may seem out of your control once your page has been hacked, there are a few things you need to do to restore the service and some simple things to reduce the risk of it happening in the first place.
Hackers get into a Facebook page through one of its administrators, not usually by hacking into Facebook directly. A page administrator likely clicked a bogus email link and typed in their password, which is then sent to the hackers.
Surely forcing all admins to enable two-factor authentication on their account is the most important step of all. That would completely eliminate the possibility of being hacked I would have thought – perhaps not by Anonymous but certainly by some kiddie planning to post nude photos.
Astute, logical, rational points to contrast the sensationalist piece from yesterday!
@Josh – indeed. And there’s another thing individual users should do.
I know of a fb page that was posting spam links by some unknown user – and that user was not listed as a page admin and wasn’t known by anyone.
Turned out that an app had installed itself on one of the admin’s facebook account (probably after the admin clicked on some dodgy link) – it was having fun with both his personal facebook account AND the page he administrated, posting links to dodgy sites and apps using a different (fake) profile name.
In short, users should also go to: Settings > Apps in facebook, and check that there are no strange looking apps in there – delete any you’re not sure about.