These days, Social Media have become a significant need in our everyday life. It encourages us to associate and connect with anyone over the world. We share our day to day routine, private life, and our financial details with our followers. That is the reason; malicious hackers pick social media platform for hacking because they get every single aspect of an individual without any problem.

We are living in an era where technological advancements are rapidly flourishing, despite people having non-technical backgrounds are unable to pay attention to how to secure their data from malicious hackers.  Around the world, there are currently 2.8 million cybersecurity professionals who have complete knowledge of malicious hacking and how to prevent it. Unfortunately, that is a minimal number related to how many people are using social media, giving their day to day information on these platforms, which are prone to cyber-attacks.

How Hacker Accesses Your Social Media Account

In this article, I will explain each tactic of a malicious hacker so that you will get an idea of how these hackers can hack social media accounts. These are the most common attacks a hacker can perform:

Man in the Middle Attack

This type of attack occurs when a hacker privately steals and alters the communication between the sender and receiver. A user may think he is communicating with a legitimate user, but actually, all the conversation is passing through hacker, and he possibly alters their communication without their knowledge.

For this purpose, BurpSuite is the commonly used tool by hackers to perform a man in the middle attack. By using this tool, hackers can intercept between the machine and a server, captures the request that is generated by machine to the server, and alters it by requesting another thing from the server.

Prevention

Always use a good antivirus with a firewall that can detect the fake user. Besides, use VPN and Proxy server to access the network.

Phishing Attack

Phishing is the most common yet most effective tactic used by hackers to fool people and steal their information. In this attack, a hacker will make a fake social media login page that looks legitimate and share it with victims to get login from a fake site. When a victim enters its credentials, it directly redirects to the hacker’s machine. This is the most effective technique because many users can not differentiate between the real and fake sites’ login pages and get fooled by giving their credentials. This attack requires persistence and excellent skills for making the victim login from your duplicate fake page.

Prevention

Double-check the URL before entering your credentials or any personal information. Moreover, do not log in through messages and emails.

DNS Spoofing/ Cache Poisoning Attack

DNS Spoofing is a type of malicious attack wherein a user is forced to navigate to a fake website page disguised to look like a legitimate one, divert traffic or steal credentials of the users.

Attackers can poison a DNS cache by manipulating DNS resolvers into caching false information, with the result that the resolver sends the wrong IP address to users, and users attempting to navigate to a website will be directed to the wrong place.

Spoofing attacks can go on for a long period without being detected and can cause severe security issues.

Prevention

Learn to manage your DNS server and firewall securely.

Cookie Hijacking

This attack generated by saved cookies from your browser. When the user login an online account i.e. Facebook or Twitter account, the server returns a session cookie, which is a piece of data that indicates the user to the server and provides them access to their account. Given that the user’s device holds on to that session token, the server will allow them to use the application.

When a user signs out of an application, the server immediately invalidates the session token, and all further access to the account requires the user to submit their login credentials again.

A hacker steals the session token and, with the help of this token, access the user’s account. The token can be hijacked by inflicting the user’s device with malware that monitors and steals session data. Another method can be used to hijack the session i.e., cross-site scripting attack in which hacker uploads a malicious code into a webpage that the user frequently visits and forces the user’s computer to send the session cookie data to the server.

Prevention

Clean your cookies from browsers in every 4-5 days and never use public wifi.

Keylogging

Another most straightforward way to hack social media is keylogging. There is a software named “key logger” that is made by hackers to trace out the pattern of the keys of keyboard typed by the user. After that, it immediately generates a file of that key pattern and sends it to the hacker’s computer through the internet. With this technique, a hacker can compromise even computer experts because this can be downloaded from anywhere.

Keyloggers can be installed by a social engineering attack when a user clicks on a link or opens an attachment/file from a phishing mail.

Keyloggers can also be installed through the webpage script. This is done by exploiting a vulnerable browser, and the keylogger is launched when the user visits the malicious site.

Prevention

Always download software from trusted sites only and avoid opening phishing emails.

This article explains how hackers compromise your social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) and how to prevent these attacks by applying simple security measures. The most common techniques used by hackers are discussed above. I hope you are now well aware of these techniques and have learned how to keep yourself safe.