What Do You do If (When) Your Facebook is Hacked?

Allen Mireles — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 03:37:51 +0000

I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed last night when I saw an update from B.L. Ochman, a social media friend and colleague whose account had just been hacked. She clicked on a link, which unleashed the Trojan Ramnit on her Facebook account. While this worm has created untold headaches for the Facebook account holders whose data has been stolen, to date, the social network has not addressed the situation with its users. According to PC World, Facebook says it is bolstering its antivirus protection and reminds users to “protect themselves by never clicking on strange links and reporting any suspicious activity they encounter…”

Practical advice but not always easy to remember as we fly through updates and videos posted by friends we trust. In this case, Ochman’s friend’s account had been hacked first and neither was aware of it.

ZDNet states that hackers have used a Ramnit worm variant to harvest 45,000 Facebook login credentials worldwide, purportedly mostly from users in the United Kingdom and France. According to a statement from the social network, more than half of the information stolen was from inactive accounts. However, as blogger Emil Protalinski points out, that still leaves about 20,000 people who, like Ochman, have had their accounts hacked. The possibility exists that infected Facebook account holders will find that the email accounts they have used to access Facebook have been infected as well.

So what do you do if, or more likely, when your account is hacked? First of all, do what I did right after reading my friend’s post. Change your password. Don’t use the same email you use for other accounts and make your password strong. Then change the password to the email account you use to access your Facebook account. And that’s just for starters. You may need to uninstall and reinstall your web browser. Monitor your account closely and close your account each time you leave the site. (Leaving your account open apparently leaves you more open to hackers.) Facebook encourages users to visit and “like” the Facebook Security page to receive updates about how to protect your information both on and off the social network. Yet the most recent post on the Facebook Security wall is from December 2011, with no mention of the Trojan Ramnit.

Finally, check your security settings again and check the applications you have allowed access to your account. Some of us have so many applications installed that checking all of them feels overwhelming. Knowing which applications have permission to access your social network account is critical. An easy way to address this is to use the tool mypermissions to quickly and easily check and edit the permissions you have given to applications across the web.

Facebook has, for better or worse, become part of our daily lives. According to a survey by comScore, released in December of 2011, one in every seven online minutes is spent on Facebook. Facebook’s active user base has grown to more 800 million and according to Facebook the typical user has 130 friends and is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events. Take a second close look at your passwords, permissions and security settings. Share this story with your networks and remind them to do the same.

According to Zone Alarm, more than 20% of Facebook newsfeed links currently open viruses and 7 Facebook logins are compromised every second each day. The odds are pretty good that you may have to deal with this–or will know someone who does.

Google Seems to Have Misplaced My Facebook Fan Page—Have You Seen It Anywhere?

Allen Mireles — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 14:52:06 +0000

Until recently a search on my name in either Google or Yahoo produced the same results: my website and blog, my profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter; and my fledgling Facebook fan page for my social media consulting business. As a social media consultant, I have used my name as a search term to demonstrate that social networking sites come up early as search results. I have also done this to show how Facebook pages show up at the top of search results.

Earlier this week, in a discussion with a local businessman about the power and benefits of social networking, I did a search in Google for my name. My site and blog came up as did my profiles in LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Posterous. No sign of my Facebook fan page. My fan page is relatively new and I use it to share information about using social media for business. I share links to the posts others have written, I ask questions often and occasionally get responses from my 324 fans. I share the rare posts from my own blog. I started my fan page deliberately so that I would have personal experience with the positives and negatives of maintaining a Facebook page for my social media consulting business.

So I searched on a former client’s name. No Facebook fan page. Yet he has a carefully tended page with thousands of fans and his page used to come early in results from a search on his name. I then searched for Coca Cola; a well known brand with an extremely popular page. No fan page. I started to ask questions, first surreptitiously and then openly. I have tweeted, emailed and posted and no one seems to have an answer. Yet. Some of my friends offer the opinion that Google has, once again, changed its algorithms and that explains it. Or have posited that the inclusion of real-time search has changed how pages come up in search now. An SEO expert explained that I needed to write my posts differently using my page name within the post so that Google would read it and include it.

That may be the answer. We’ll see. Feels a bit awkward to include that language but it’s worth trying. However, that doesn’t explain why it used to come up and now doesn’t. My fan page, Allen Mireles Social Media Consulting or http://facebook.com/amsocialmediaconsulting, shows up in a search from within Facebook. As does my former client’s and Coca Cola’s. From outside of Facebook, however, not so much. My fan page shows up on page two of a Yahoo! search on my name (it didn’t yesterday) so that’s something. But what changed? And how much does it matter?

Oh wait! A Bing search on my name yields three references to my Facebook fan page on page one of the results. Has my fan page become a victim of dueling search engines?

What do you think? Do you have any suggestions? What am I missing here?

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Allen Mirelessocial networking | Allen Mireles

What Do You do If (When) Your Facebook is Hacked?

Google Seems to Have Misplaced My Facebook Fan Page—Have You Seen It Anywhere?