When a person is hacking, it can harm their reputation and cost thousands of dollars in lost ad revenue. This is what happened to Dale Berry, the owner of a preschool English academy in Japan who had his Facebook account hacked by fraudsters. Hackers ran fraudulent ads using his account, draining his business of money and left him with a tarnished reputation.

Hackers first target those who have weak passwords such as "qwerty" or "password." They then impersonate a friend to ask for a code to reset the password. They then make use of the security feature that allows people to add friends as trusted contacts in the event they lose their password and ask trusted friends to provide the one-time password required to gain access to the account.

Purchase of stolen login information is another method hackers can gain access. A cache of 26 million Amazon, LinkedIn and Facebook passwords was recently discovered available for sale on the dark web. Many of them were released via custom Trojan malware that infiltrated millions Windows-based PCs between the years of 2018 and 2020.

Users can protect themselves from attacks by checking that the address bar on their browser is Facebook and not another website. It is recommended that users use a password which combines numbers, letters and spaces. Never reuse it for any other email or social media account. Additionally they should monitor their activity notifications regularly. Twitter is one example. It sends notifications whenever users log in from a new location or device.