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by John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

How to Recover Access to Your Hacked Account

October 18, 2022

We’ve all seen it. You see some sort of message, notification, posting or any other type of information from someone you know that you are sure did not originate from them. Their account has probably been compromised and the cyber criminal is spreading misinformation in order to get an acquaintance to send money, buy some gift cards or perform some other tasks for financial gain. Of course, it’s always the other person whose account was compromised and not your own. Yeah, right.

The Verge has a post with instructions for getting back access to your account should it be overtaken by someone else. As the post identifies, there are several signs that your account has been compromised.

  • Pics or videos you never shot appear as your Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok posts.
  • Friends are getting bogus messages from you on Facebook or Twitter.
  • Spotify is playing music you never queued up.
  • A device you don’t own logged in with your Apple ID.
  • New contacts appear in your Snapchat account.
  • A genuine email from Instagram says that your email address was changed.

If you are unfortunate enough to lose access to your account, the post has account recovery steps for Apple, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, Spotify, TikTok and Twitter. Hopefully, you have already set up a secondary method to access your account. Some services also have humans available to help regain access. Obviously, you should have protected access to your account in the first place (make sure MFA is configured, strong password, etc.).

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