The ABC of Keeping your Social Media Accounts Secure

I heard on the radio the other day a story about a business owner called Rebecca who owns a jewellery boutique. Obviously this past year she’s relied more and more on selling via social media — primarily Instagram. She had a following of 11k and 50% of her sales come via the channel.

How did the hack present itself? She got a DM purporting to be from Instagram advising that there’d been a copyright violation in a post. It then offered a link for her to appeal. She panicked and clicked the link. Bingo, the hackers were in.

Rebecca tried to log back in to her account, but the hacker had added 2FA (two factor authentication) and then she received an email blackmailing her to get the account back.

Sadly she found Instagram Help, frankly unhelpful and she ended up creating a second account to keep her business going. In fact, it does say this in the Troubleshooting section of their help pages: “If your account was deleted by you or someone with your password, there’s no way to restore it.” Great!

She did eventually get her account back with perseverance and intervention via a press contact, but it was a very scary time for her as you can imagine.

What can you do to protect your accounts?

* Do MAKE YOUR PASSWORD SECURE — characters, numbers and letters [previous advice on random word strings is not secure as they are “dictionary/real” words]

* Do ADD TWO-FACTOR AUTHENTICATION — will pick up unusual login attempts

* Do NOT ENGAGE WITH HACKERS — no matter how desperate you feel

You can also report any cybercrime to Action Fraud: call 0300 123 2040