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Random email generator for facebook4/21/2024 Over the past month, I’ve read a lot about how you can try to get your account back after it’s been hacked, but I wanted to share a few thoughts about how to try to prevent this from happening in the first place.įirst, please remember that hacking by strangers isn’t personal: it’s simply about gathering as much information as possible that can be sold on in bulk ( here’s an example about Depop published just this week). But it’s not all doom and gloom: I can see that I have over a hundred notifications on the account at the moment, indicating that the hackers have been kicked out too. The only person who seems to have found a solution is Christopher, who commented that he was able to get control of his account back only after he bought an Oculus VR device and needed to register it. Indeed, there are multiple threads about the exact same issue, with the exact same lack of response. I investigated the problem via Facebook’s help section and discovered that the misuse of two-factor authentication in this way was not uncommon. It felt as sleazy as being hacked in the first place. I took to Twitter to complain, but I discovered that using words like “Facebook”, “account”, and “hacked” in the same tweet brought with it a new problem: random accounts messaged me promising to fix the issue. Dozens of ID photographs later and I still haven’t heard anything. I assumed this would be checked by an actual person and I would be back in within a few days (or a few weeks at most-after all, this occurred just before Christmas). The other choice is sending in a photograph of ID. We can’t give you access to this account or help with your request until we receive an accepted form of ID that matches the information listed on the account. Seems simple enough … but I tried several different forms of ID, including my passport, and every message I received said: One option seemed to be an automatic ID reader: you enter an email address you still have access to and hold up an ID to your webcam. And Facebook is a multi-gazillion dollar company: they must have solutions, right?Īnd you’re not wrong: they do have systems in place. “But surely,” you’re thinking, “Facebook must have a way around this!” After all, extinct email accounts, hackers, and not taking online security as seriously as we should is practically old hat by now. I found myself in the centre of a perfect storm of my own lax security, with hackers who had engaged in the digital equivalent of pouring glue in a lock. The problem occurs when, again, it points away from the account owner and to the hackers instead. This is supposed to increase the security of a system because you need to enter a code in addition to your password. Second, they activated two-factor authentication. The default recovery-sending a code to your email address-is now useless. Everything now points to an address only the hackers have access to. While I was going through the Facebook process for securing my account and changing my password, the hackers did two things that have now made it impossible for me to log back in.įirst, a long-defunct email address that I must have listed somewhere in the bowels of my Facebook settings was re-registered and all of my other email addresses were deleted. The hackers were in and the race was on … but it wasn’t a race I could win. But something had changed: I no longer had control of the account. Whew, that was close …Įxcept that a few hours later I received a similar message. Simple question: is this you or not? I clicked the button for “not” and was told that I didn’t have to do anything else. It started in mid-December with an email from Facebook saying that someone was trying to reset my password. While I am all in favour of digital detoxes, this is not exactly what I had in mind! Instead, I hope this serves as a cautionary tale about how to potentially avoid the mistakes that have seen me locked out of Facebook for over a month. This is not a blog post about travel, history, nature, or tea, although, as always, a lot of tea was consumed in the composition of it.
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