Question of the day: Help! My Facebook account has been hacked!
Our question of the day comes from several people who complained that their friends had posts on their wall from them asking them to watch a video. Has this happened to you? Or, have you received these posts on your walls? These are all generated from applications downloaded into your Facebook account. Here’s what you do:
If you received one of these posts on your wall:
- Do NOT watch the video. This is what opens up your account to spam. Take your mouse and hover over the top right part of the post, and hit MARK AS SPAM. This will remove the post from your wall.
If your account is putting these posts on your friend’s walls:
- Go to your Account by following the link in the top right of your page called Account
- Choose Privacy Settings
- Choose Apps and Websites (click the Edit your settings link in lower left)
- Choose Apps you use (click Remove unwanted or spammy apps)
- Then click Edit Settings next to the app to see what it has access to/permission to do – many of them have permission to post on your friend’s walls.
- If you are still concerned, you can also change your Facebook password. While it’s not likely part of this problem, it’s a good practice to change it on a regular basis.
Part of the fun of Facebook is the wide variety of applications that can integrate with it. But choose carefully when you give permission to access your account. Don’t do it for the simple pleasure of watching a video or viewing a photo. Be sure that the application is a legitimate one. And, if you see a video that seems out of this world (“See Osama Bin Laden die”, “Watch a teen commit suicide on web cam”, etc), do NOT watch it. It opens up your account to spam.
Have questions about social media you’d like to see addressed in our column? Send them to info@dreamlocal.com, or post them on our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/dreamlocal.
About a month ago, while I was away from home and at a time when my I’d used my cell phone so much that it had “died”, someone was able to hack on to my FB page and posted a series of pharmaceutical spam messages in broken English. So broken was the English, in fact that it included references to “myself” (since the material appeared next to my name) could have been construed as being read in the past tense. More than a few of my friends actually took this seriously, presumed, I guess, that I was going to “off” myself, and proceeded to call the police. I discovered this that night when I returned home and confronted the embarrassment of my next door neighbor telling me that police had been by, and then after I logged on to facebook and got a couple of messages cluing me in as to what happened. But what infuriated me was that I never actually saw the offending material – the preceding account essentially is an amalgam of what was described to me by friends. Maybe the offender deleted the references after s/he saw what kind of panic was being produced; but I can’t rule out the possibility that maybe Facebook deleted it itself after they presumably were contacted by the police and realized that their own lax security caused needless chaos.
Obviously, I’ve deleted my FB account. Not surprisingly, I summarized this story when I was asked by FB as to “why” I was deleting the account and no one ever got back to me (I mean, I don’t advertise on FB, so why should they care?)
I’m very disappointed that I have a bunch of friends who get so easily fooled by a hacker and/or think so little of me that they’d actually think I’d not only attempt suicide but declare my intentions publicly. That’s my problem. But this was an instance not only of where my page got so easily hacked, but where FB itself may have been complicit in abetting a hacker after they themselves discovered they had, well, f–ked up royally. Anybody else have a similar experience?