Every single day i get emails in my inbox and on my facebook page from users querying about how to recover hacked facebook account and a common problem i see in all of them is that they are proactive. Everyone searches for Facebook account recovery softwares, Facebook hacking softwares and recovery mechanisms after their facebook or any other email account has been hacked. In this article, Gary suggests methods to identify if your computer or email account has been hacked and methods suggesting what you can do after your facebook account has been hacked.

In today’s digital world, it is unfortunately not uncommon for an account or machine to become compromised by an attacker for nefarious purposes. During your searches for a step-by-step solution, your frustration may hit the breaking point, as you scroll through page after page, listing preventative measures that it may already be too late for. No problem. In today’s article I will outline simple strategies that should get you back in control of your online accounts and devices after a breach is suspected or confirmed. These instructions will be laid out in a manner that should be quite easy for an average user to comprehend and execute. But first, let’s take a minute to understand exactly how this probably happened in the first place.

NOTE: If you are potentially dealing with this situation right now, please skip ahead to the “ What do I do?” section of this article, first. Then be sure to read the rest.

Did I Get Hacked?

You’re browsing around online and suddenly your friends on social media are asking you what these links you keep sending them are, or perhaps your password to an online account has been changed, emails are being sent from your email account, or there is just something strange in your activity log. Do any of these mean that your account has been compromised?

First of all, always assume your account and system have been compromised and take the appropriate measures to secure them, when in doubt. Do not let an attacker maintain a foothold and continue masquerading as you and/or stealing your sensitive data and files, while you come up with excuses to justify unfamiliar activity. Also, while many online services and accounts have a ‘connected devices’, ‘location information’, or ‘login activity’ viewer in their settings, this should never be advised as a sure-fire way to rule out being hacked. There are many ways that these features can be rendered useless - malware can be installed on the user’s machine which sets up an HTTP or SOCKS proxy on the machine of the user, session cookies can be stolen, and even the online account settings themselves can be manipulated or even flawed to cover malicious activity. Secure your accounts and system, anyway, just to be safe. It may be time consuming, but it is far better than waiting around for something bad to happen.

How Does This Happen (Methods To Hack Facebook Account)?

There are many methods which attackers deploy to breach online accounts of their victims. This is not meant to be an instruction manual or even a comprehensive list of every way an attacker can possibly compromise your system, accounts, and/or online services. This is just an overview of the most common real-world techniques that are actually being deployed. If you’ve been hacked, chances are good that it was done by a combination of the techniques listed below.

There are Man-In-The-Middle Attacks which capture data packets from the victim machine and store them, before sending them along to the proper destination. There’s Phishing, where an attacker convinces you to sign in to your account via a fake login page, then steals your credentials. Sometimes websites themselves are hacked via sql injection methods that dump the entire database of usernames and password hashes… these same username/password combinations are then attempted on many various sites, since a lot of users use the same login credentials across many websites and services. Then there is potentially the most dangerous… malware can be installed on the victim machine which can do anything from logging keystrokes, to remotely browsing the filesystem, to opening a remote shell, or even spying on the users via their webcams and microphones.

The malicious hacker’s toolbox of techniques is always evolving and changing to meet changes in security practice and while there are other ways accounts can be compromised, most real-world hacks are a combination of some of the techniques listed above.

“What Do I Do?”

I would like to divide this into three sections, as each are important. Secure Your Accounts and Services, Secure Your Machines and Devices, and Damage Control. You don’t know for sure how much of a foot-hold an attacker has or how long they have had it, before you realized or became suspicious. So assume everything has been compromised and secure each of them, as they may be used by an attacker to later re-compromise what you have secured.