Social Media has become an important part of our daily life. Social media helps us connect with anyone at any time around the world. Because of that you usually also spend a lot of time in a day in it.
Many communications on social media contain our personal and financial details. That is why hackers choose social media accounts to hack because they can get every user’s details easily.
Nowadays people are not very aware of hacking and how to protect themselves, which is why their accounts can be hacked. Few people know about cybersecurity. So, as report by breakingolds, here are the attacks commonly use by hackers to hack social media accounts and how to protect yourself from them.
Man in Middle Attack
In this attack, the hacker will personally steal the confirmation between the sender and the recipient, without their knowledge. Users think they are communicating privately with each other. But hackers are secretly relaying and possibly altering their communications, without their knowledge.
BurpSuite is the most common software use to perform this Man In Middle Attack stance. What Burpsuite does is snoop between the machine and the server and hold requests with it. Burpsuite will then check all the details of which machine is requesting to the server and in some cases, Burpsuite can also change it and request something else with the server. This Burpsuite cheats machines and servers.
How do you protect yourself from attacks like this?
- Use Antivirus with a good firewall that can detect fake users
- Use VPN for private network
- Proxy Server to access network
Keylogging
Keylogging is the easiest way to hack social media. Key logger is software create by hackers to track or record keyboard keys pressed by users. Then the software automatically creates the file and sends it to the hacker’s machine via the internet.
This is the most efficient way of hacker technique that can even hack computer experts because this Key logger can be downloaded from anywhere.
How to protect yourself from this Key logger attack?
- Use a good antivirus
- Download software only from trusted sites
- Scan Any external drive before using
Phishing
Phishing is the most common and most effective hack use by hackers for years. In phishing, hackers create clones of some social media login pages and then share them with the victim when the victim logs in on that page.
Then the user’s username and password will be redirect to the hacker’s machine. There are many opportunities to be hacked by this method if the user does not have basic knowledge of the internet. Most hackers create clones of social media login pages.
This attack requires patience and good skills to allow the victim to log in from your duplicate page. How to protect yourself from this Phishing attack?
- Always check the URL before login
- Login by writing your social media name on google
- You must use a good browser capable of identifying fake pages
- Do not log in via email and messages
Browser Passwords
Usually, people save their account passwords and credit card details in the browser. Anyone can check those details from your browser’s password manager and steal them. A hacker can gain physical access to your laptop through social engineering and can extract all the passwords from a USB device called Rubber Ducky.
Hackers can also install extensions on your laptop via the internet and can extract all your passwords and device data. This also happened to one of his friends and then he was blackmailed by hackers.
How to protect yourself from this Browser Password theft attack?
- Do not share your personal information with your friends
- Don’t share your laptop with anyone
- Do not store your passwords on your laptop
Social Engineering
Social Engineering is a basic technique to gather as much information from victims as you can. For example, a friend asks for a password from his friends and gets it. It is also called psychological manipulation.
Hackers will ask for information such as name, date of birth, first school, pet’s name, phone number, etc. And using this information he will log into your social accounts.
How to protect yourself from these Social Engineering attacks?
- Never share your personal information with anyone
- Don’t trust anyone or links easily
DNS Spoofing
This method is possible if the user and the hacker are on the same network. This hacker can replace the victim machine page with a fake page. It can also easily get a user’s social account credentials with it. How to protect yourself from this DNS Spoofing attack?
- Manage your DNS servers
- Manage your firewall safely
Piracy
This attack uses cookies that are stored in your browser. When a user logs in from a laptop, your server and machine maintain a session between them, and the session details are saved in your browser cookie. Hackers will hack those cookies to get your credentials and extensions that also have access to those cookies. So choose your extensions carefully.
How to protect yourself from this piracy attack?
- Don’t use any public wifi
- Clean your cookies every 4-5 days
Those are some of the most common techniques used by hackers to hack social media accounts. There may be some techniques used by professional hackers that are not yet known. Hopefully, you are now aware of this and know how to keep your account safe.
More about Tecnology
