How to restore access to your account, or what to do if hacked in social networks

Although the password was complex. Also, with a certain frequency, messages from people from the list of friends come to Vkontakte with a request to borrow money for unforeseen expenses. And if earlier these were just suspicious messages, now they can send a photo of the interlocutor’s card with sometimes a good photoshopped number and a name on it. If you don’t think about it at this moment, you can lose your money. Also works in the opposite direction. If scammers beg money from someone on our behalf, there is a risk of ruining relations with friends.

How is this possible? Who benefits from hacking random social media accounts? How can we protect ourselves from this and what to do if we have already been hacked? Let’s figure it out.

How to recover your password on social networks if you have been hacked
What to do if your VKontakte account is hacked
What to do if your Instagram account is hacked
What to do if your Odnoklassniki account is hacked
What to do if your Facebook account is hacked
How to Avoid Social Hacking: General Safety Tips
How to recover your password on social networks if you have been hacked
Social networks have become part of our life, so much so that a personal account is an intimate thing, and our phone / tablet / PC is not only a device for interacting with content, but also our key / passport / way of accessing banking applications. And even a minute with access to the device from a stranger can do something irreparable.

When hacking social networks, attackers immediately change the password in order to have time to turn their dirty tricks. Password Recovery is our best friend, every service has it.

In most cases, the password can be recovered by mail or a mobile phone to which the page is linked. Enter the data in the input field and wait for a message from the site. Usually, to change the password, a temporary password is sent to the mail or by SMS, which gives a small head start – you can just put a temporary password and restore access to your page.

If the attacker did not manage to change the password, but there is suspicious activity from the page, then in most services you can simply log out of active sessions from other devices.

examples of messages about restoring access to an account

Perhaps, to restore access to the page, there may not be enough contact information, and you will need, for example, to indicate the name given during registration, the approximate registration date or previously used passwords on this site. This will let the support know that you are really involved with this page – it will speed up the process significantly.

The difficulty is that the consideration of the application may take some time, and if suddenly there is personal data on the page or in the messages, then attackers can use it. Unfortunately, nowhere will it be possible to destroy or temporarily block a page on social networks remotely.

Now let’s look at the separate rules for restoring pages for each individual social network.

What to do if your Vkontakte account is hacked
Hacking of pages on Vkontakte has existed almost since its opening in 2006. There are a lot of hacking methods, and if once upon a time it was possible to get by with simple parsing (automatic brute-force of all kinds of passwords using special software) passwords, nowadays even mobile operators are connected to hack pages to forward calls and messages.

So, if we have lost access to the page, then we act according to the following plan:

Instantly click on the “forgot password” button and enter either mail or phone number.
Next, we will be asked to write a surname in order to make sure that we want to restore access to our page.
After that, you need to confirm the page, access to which should be restored. Click “This is my page” and wait for a letter in the mail.
In the mail, follow the link and change the password to the desired one.
Then we immediately go to the security settings and end all active sessions.
active vkontakte sessions

It is also important to go to your personal messages and make sure that there are no messages on your behalf asking for material assistance, and if they suddenly exist, immediately delete them.

To prevent the hacking from happening again, we recommend setting up two-factor authentication using the application or SMS. True, if the attackers decide to hack the profile through a mobile operator, then the method will not save. However, this hacking costs a lot of money, so it’s not often practiced.

If the page could not be restored through standard means, you need to contact Vkontakte technical support.

What to do if your Instagram account is hacked
As already mentioned in the first paragraph of the article, it is not uncommon for such a letter to come that someone tried to log into the account. Who needs it and why – we can only guess. But if the attackers still managed to get access to the Instagram account, then we act by analogy with Vkontakte:

First you need to go to the password recovery section and enter all the necessary data to “reanimate” it.

instagram main page

Next, we write the data that is required to recover the password:

get login link

Then it’s worth checking your Stories.