This is how you protect your accounts from being hacked

It was in the middle of September. Artist Jennifer Love Lopez had just created a business page for her production company. Then she received an email from Meta.

– The email had a Meta logo and the address looked okay. It said “so that we don’t shut down your account, you need to log in”. I logged in. The moment I logged in, all my accounts were hacked. The business accounts, my artist profiles, my personal profile. Everything disappeared when I logged in to the link, she says.

Although she quickly realized her mistake and blocked her account, the hijacker was ahead of her. Money had been withdrawn from her business account. In addition, several social media accounts disappeared and her name and password were changed.

– It was a total disaster, I felt completely stressed out. It was like a digital rape.

She did everything in her power to get her accounts back. She contacted Meta’s customer service and their security manager, with no response. She reported the incident to the police and reported the theft to the bank.

She got her money back, but the accounts were still hacked.

This is how you protect yourself

Having your account hacked means that someone else takes over the account by changing your name, email and phone number. Then the account can be sold on the dark web so that someone can commit crimes with the profile.

The best way to protect yourself is to have a strong password. Many use the same pattern: a capital letter, a year of birth and a few exclamation marks, but it is not enough, says IT security expert David Jacoby.

– You don’t need to remember all your passwords. The passwords you rarely use, when you maybe buy a holiday trip or a concert ticket, then you can just come up with a password. When you then need to log in again, you can click that you have forgotten your password. You don’t have to give out a good password on sites that don’t mean anything.

The pages you use often need a strong password, he says and gives tips:

– Use a sentence, like “I like the gym”, something that is personal. Then you put a special character “I like the gym?”, then after that sentence you put a word that you associate with the site.

In the end, it could be something like “I like the gym? FRIENDS”.

“Was so happy”

Now Jennifer has got her accounts back after almost 3 months. It only happened after she got in touch with David Jacoby.

– I became so happy. I got back information, important information that I need in my work. I got access to all my contacts too.