It’s time people realize the importance of their social accounts. Thousands of Twitter and Facebook accounts get hacked daily and many a times, a hacker doesn’t have to work hard hacking them. It’s terribly easy to fool people and make them give their passwords themselves.
People have literally lost their minds these days which has made it easy for hackers to hack into their Twitter accounts. Hackers don’t really have to do some serious hacking stuff like remotely accessing a computer or performing brute-force attacks. All they have to do is this –
1. Hackers first register a domain which somehow looks like the domain of the account they’re trying to hack.
Ex: Registering “faceb00k.com” if they want to hack your Facebook account or registering “tvvitter.com” to hack into your Twitter account.
If you look at both the domains patiently, you’d notice that the o’s in facebook.com are not actually o’s; they’re 0’s! Whereas in twitter.com, two v’s are used instead of a w.
It’s really easy to get similar looking domains. They come with various extensions and above that they’re available cheaply. PS: GoDaddy.com runs $1 domain offers almost every other month.
2. Once they’ve found similar looking domains, it’s a piece of cake to take you to the fake website.
Hackers use some really attractive marketing techniques to drive you to the fake websites. Sometimes they really go cheap wherein they share attractive images with you and asking you to click on the provided link while sometimes they send you messages which look personal but they aren’t. In both the cases they give a link and make sure that you click on them!
3. On clicking the link, you are taken to the fake website where you’re asked to enter your password to continue. Some fools do it and get their accounts hacked while some smart ones (like our readers) don’t fall into these traps and continue to own their accounts 😉
Now that’s how your account gets hacked in some of the most silliest, yet simple ways. Here’s how you can avoid falling into these silly traps.
1. Check your address bar twice. The site you’ve opened might not be the one you actually wanted to open.
2. Further cross check if the website you’ve opened is preceded by https. Most of the popular social networking sites use https. This confirms that the site is genuine.
3. Never enter your password unless you think it’s really necessary for you to enter it. If you think a site is asking for your password inappropriately, especially when you did not expect it to ask for your password, simply close the webpage and type in the website in your address bar.
4. Two websites might seem same, but may not be the same. Replicating a website takes less than a day and an experience hacker cum designer can do it in hours! So don’t go on a website’s design.
That’s all you need to prevent your account from getting hacked by this silly method. How silly would it be if you handover your password to a hacker yourself! Just imagine! Take care!
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