Hi friends! As many of you noticed, my account got hacked last nignt and the user sent a lot of bizarre and aggressive messages to those who follow me. I wanted to say a huge thank you to every single person who reached out to me or attempted to report the account/communicate with the hacker in some way. After talking to several people I also found out that many others have fallen victim to this same type of hacking and were never able to recover their personal account, which not only feels violating having somebody talk to your friends while pretending to be you, but can also be devastating to those of us who rely on social platforms to keep our small businesses afloat. I really lucked out that I had a friend who works at Facebook who was able to help with the account recovery, as Instagram doesn’t really offer any sort of live or personal support when it
comes to resolving these issues. So I wanted to spread awareness to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else I know.
1.) If you haven’t already, set up two-factor identification on all of your social accounts so a discovered password isn’t enough for a hacker to gain access to your account
2.) If a friend sends you a link asking to verify their profile so they can log in to their account on a new phone, text that friend outside of any social apps to be sure it’s them and that their account hasn’t also been hacked. (Friend verification is a common practice that I have encountered with Facebook/Instagram before, which is why I didn’t immediately assume it was suspicious.)
3.) change your passwords regularly and try not to use the same password for every application in your life (easier said than done ,I know.)
I know I haven’t had time to reach out to every single person who contacted me in the past 24 hours, but I wanted to say thank you from the bottom of my heart, and thank you for reminding me that for as many cruel people as there are in the world, there are even more good ones who ar