Have You Been Hacked?

With the rise of social media, I get loads of requests on my website asking about issues of account comprimisation. (Hacking).
Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Linkedin....they are all susceptible to being pawned.
Now, for those of you that don't know what being pawned is, its basically having your account hacked by someone who is not authorized to do so.
When a hacker compromises your personal account, he/she will usually paste the details onto a website in which they can stay in touch with other like minded people (hackers) in order to sell your personal details for money, swap it for other hacked accounts, boast about it with his group of pawners, or generally just cause havoc and give you a headache!

One such popular website is Pastebin (a code sharing hangout for blackhats), but there are may others.
They will post such information as;
A listing of subnet addresses that belong to various corporations, a dump of compromised Facebook accounts complete with email addresses and passwords, an internal user database of a compromised website including email addresses, privileges and password hashes, an export of a users tables from a compromised database, including usernames and passwords etc....you get the idea!


Twitter runs a bot called Dump Monitor which keeps an eye on these 'paste' sites for dumps of user account passwords, and other information which is sensitive to you, or your company!
Another such eye on hackers is a site called 'have I been pawned'.

I guess what I'm trying to reiterate here is that its never easy to find out what happens to your social media data once it has been compromised and indeed, if it has at all.
If you suspect something out of the ordinary see, How to tell if your Facebook has been hacked, and how to better secure it, 15 giveaway signs you have been hacked within your own network by techtalk, and what to do if your twitter account is hacked by PC World.

As we all say here on Majorgeeks, keep your software up to date, don't click on emails you don't recognize, beware of pop-ups prompting you to update software, and the latest tricks of getting you to click on links for holiday discounts, shopping discount codes, free 'clean your computer' pops and anything else that seems like your singled out for a bargain!

What I always say......If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is!

Safe browsing all

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