National Cybersecurity Awareness Month

Week 2 - Hacked Accounts

The average Internet user has in excess of 32 separate online accounts. Many of these may or may not be regularly maintained. It would therefore come as no surprise when many of use fall victim to a compromised account.

Below are some tips on how spot and deal with a compromised account:

What are some signs that one of my online accounts may have been hacked?

There are posts you never made on your social network page – they may be posts that encourage your friends to click on a link or download an app.
A friend, family member or colleague reports getting email from you that you never sent.
Your information was lost via a data breach, malware infection or lost/stolen device.

If you believe an account has been compromised, take the following steps:

Notify all of your contacts that they may receive spam messages appearing to come from your account. Tell your contacts they shouldn’t open messages or click on any links from your account and warn them about the potential for malware.
If you believe your computer is infected, be sure your security software is up to date, and scan your system for malware. You can also use other scanners and removal tools.
Change passphrases to all accounts that have been compromised and other key accounts as soon as possible. A strong passphrase is a sentence that is at least 12 characters long. Focus on positive sentences or phrases that you like to think about and are easy to remember (for example, “I love country music.”). On many sites, you can even use spaces!

If you cannot access your account because a passphrase has been changed, contact the service provider immediately and follow any steps the provider offers for recovering an account.

Below are direct links to company's instructions for dealing with hacked accounts: