Facebook hacked!

[Gill W]

I use my Facebook account once in a blue moon.

It just so happens that I logged into it today, and it appears that spam has been posted from my Facebook account, back in August.

Facebook had recognised this, and 'locked down' my account.

I went through the procedure, and proved I was me, and I've reset the password. The account had been accessed from Hong Kong.

This thing is, I can't imagine for the life of me how this happened.

The last time I accessed my Facebook account was literally years ago..... At least three years ago. When I go into my Facebook account I only ever spend a few minutes in there, so I couldn't have accidently clicked a weird link, or fallen for a scam and gave out information.

The email address I use as my sign on is a hotmail account, which has only ever been used for Facebook - I've never used the email for any other purpose, and I've never given the email address out to anybody else.

So the information about my Facebook account just wasn't out there - so how on earth did they find my account and get in, to send the spam?

I just can't fathom it.

[david63]

Most likely a "spam bot" - a program that trawls around the Internet trying to access accounts. It happens all the time everywhere. We get dozens a day on this site but they very rarely get past the security procedures that are in place.

If you are using a hotmail (or even a gmail) account as a login then these databases are regularly hacked and lists of email addresses made available to those without scruples. It is then just a matter of time to "brute force" (try all combinations of letters and number) the password and then they are in. I don't know how true it is but I have read that most passwords can be found by brute force in under a minute - introduce a mixture of numbers, special characters (&%!*) and upper case characters and it then becomes a matter of days so they give up and move on.

[Gill W]

Thanks David, that is reassuring - I thought I'd been targeted in some way!

The password was fairly simple, as it was created several years ago.

These days I've beefed up my passwords to include capitals and numbers, so hopefully there'll be no repeat of this situation.

[david63]

so hopefully there'll be no repeat of this situation

Believe me - there will, but hopefully they will not be successful next time.

This sort of situation is another of the reasons that I will not touch FB with "a ten foot barge pole" - they have a less than spectacular history with their security.

[Manoverboard]

Following the TalkTalk debacle it was suggested by an ' expert ' that the best passwords are those that use a string of three words ... rubybonjoursleep for example ?



ps ... I deffo wouldn't use Facebook

[Silver_Shiney]

The best ones use a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols. Unfortunately not all sites are case sensitive or allow symbols

[Meg 50]

The best ones use a combination of upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols. ....

and spaces