How to avoid having your account hacked in Facebook.

You’ve seen the posts from your friends: “I saw you in this video, you were hilarious!” or “This guy got arrested for what he did to this girl.” or “Get a FREE iPad…” Your first instinct is to click on it but then a voice whispers to you that something doesn’t seem right. But the post is from your friend so it must be legitimate, right?

Here is how many of these scams work:
1.They are sent from your friend’s account because your friend fell for this same hoax and his own account was hacked and compromised. Now the hacking system is using his account to send to all of his friends (imagine how quickly these things spread!)
2.They are worded to try to get you to click on them.
3.When you click on them, you are either presented with a pop-up that asks if you want this application to access your personal information (SAY “NO” or “CANCEL”) OR you are placed on what looks like a regular Facebook screen but it isn’t, and it will “appear” as if you’ve logged out and you’ll have to enter your account and password again to log back in. HOWEVER, it will be a FAKE FACEBOOK LOGIN SCREEN!!! If you do not see “facebook.com” somewhere near the beginning of the address showing in the address bar of your browser, you are on a phishing screen that is “fishing” for your account and password!
4.IF in #3 above, you gave the application permission to access your personal information, they will have obtained the list of all of your friends and they can post messages from you to all of your friends (just like that annoying Farmville application).
5.IF in #3 above, you logged into a FAKE Facebook login screen, the hacking application will now have your account and password!!! This is really bad. Not only does it now have access to your whole account and can do ANYTHING to your account that you can do (delete it, send messages to all your friends, etc.), but it can change your password! Once it changes your password, YOU ARE LOCKED OUT and your account will be at the mercy of the hacking system. It will be a long and nasty process to prove to Facebook that you are the real owner of the account.

The primary purpose of most hacking systems is to propogate an advertisement so they get paid. It’s rarely the company that is being advertised but is instead an unethical advertiser who is getting paid by number of impressions/views…and they obviously don’t care how they get people to see the ad as long as they get paid. The goal is to go viral unethically.

Other reasons people write these types of hacks is to STEAL YOUR MONEY! They know that people tend to use the same account and password for everything. Therefore, they might be able to login to some heavily-used online systems (Amazon, PayPal, iTunes, WalMart, various banks, Hotmail, Google, etc.) with your account/password and then do things like make purchases, transfer funds, access email that might have other accounts and passwords in them, access your friends’ emails and send them phishing scams FROM YOU, etc. These kinds of hackers are very smart and selfish. They know that if they access your WalMart account, for example, they can simply make purchases with that credit card you registered in the system and send the items anywhere. If they are lucky enough to control your email account and your WalMart account, they can change things like your email address (which sends a confirmation email to the old address) and intercept the confirmation email (and delete it so you never see it) and then change the Walmart email address to their own email so they get future confirmations. Of course they’d then change the password so you can’t get back into your account. Get the idea? This is called identity theft and it’s really big business!

A final reason people write these types of hacks is to see how far it can go. Remember chain letters or emails that threaten that bad things will happen to you if you don’t send this to all of your friends? They get a thrill out of knowing their message was forwarded world-wide many times over.

How to avoid falling victim to Facebook hoaxes and hacking systems:
■When in doubt, DON’T CLICK! When the voice starts whispering to you, listen to it.
■If any application ask you if it can access your contact list or personal information, SAY NO! …unless you know and trust the application asking the question. For example, Farmville and other known games might want to tell your friends what you’re doing in the game…your friends will hate it so think twice before doing this.
■If you EVER see a Facebook Login screen, STOP & THINK!!! Look at the address bar (starts with “http://”) and see if there is a “facebook.com” somewhere near the beginning of the address. If you don’t see it then it’s probably not really a Facebook screen! It’s EASY to make a fake Facebook login screen but you can’t fake the address in the address bar so LOOK AT IT! Giving away your account name (Facebook uses your email) and your password is a big deal.

If you see posts from your account that YOU did not post or if you think you fell into a login trap, you’re probably compromised. Go change your password right away! This will immediately stop any hacking system from using your account.

source: http://spyder3000.wordpress.com/