What are Business page hacking and page fraud?
Business page hacking is when a hacker takes control of a business page by accessing an admin account in an unauthorized way.
Page fraud is when a scammer duplicates a business page with exactly the same or closely similar profile picture, logo, product picture, and descriptions.
Why do hackers and scammers target and hack pages?
Money, criminal purpose, Disrupt business activities, Ransom
Hackers might hack your page in order to keep it to ask for ransom and also they might use your page in order to steal your clients’ money and sensitive information.
Scammers might duplicate your page in order to disrupt your business activities and also they can use your goodwill for criminal purposes such as scamming your brand followers and other people.
Who are the targets of this hacking and fraud?
Online based Small, medium, and large enterprises
Hackers target pages and accounts that maintain lower security measures. In case of page hacking, if one admin account can be hacked then the whole page can be controlled. There are many business owners who hire a third-party agency to maintain their page and business accounts.
There are many incidents where the business owner provided their credit card or debit card info to that third party for page boosting. After gaining total control of the cards and financial accounts, the third-party agency moved a huge amount of money and then disappear.
How to recover and stay safe from hacking and page fraud?
There are some ways to recover your hacked accounts and IDs yet most of the time it becomes harder or impossible to recover the account. Here are some steps to follow to recover hacked accounts-
- Report compromised account: If you believe your account has been compromised by another person or a virus, go to Facebook help and click the “My account is compromised” button.
- Check admin control: If you can’t control your page, you might check if any other admin has removed you or not. Also if you believed your FB account is hacked, ask other admins to remove you from the admin role immediately in order to prevent page hacking.
- Send a message to the Facebook Security page. Link: https://www.facebook.com/security/
- Get friends to report your page by visiting it and reporting the posts it makes
But prevention is always the better option. You can prevent your accounts and pages from being hacked by following these steps-
- Make sure your password is long, unique, and secure
- Use a login approval
- Use multi-factor authentication
- DO NOT login to your account from a different device that is not yours
- Always remember to logout if you log in from a different device for any reason
- Turn on login notifications
- Set up trusted contacts
- Stay up-to-date with the latest security features
- Do not store your password on Google Chrome
- Try to memorize it. If memorizing is hard for you, at least keep it written on paper where only you can get it
- A best practice is to use another account as the admin account for your page
