How to tell if your online accounts have been hacked
This is a guide on how to check whether someone compromised your online accounts.
More and more hackers are targeting regular people with the goal of stealing their crypto, perhaps getting into their bank accounts or simply stalking them. These types of attacks are still relatively rare, so there’s no need for alarm. But it’s important to know what you can do to protect yourself if you suspect someone got into your email or social media account.
A few years ago, I wrote a guide to help people protect themselves, and understand that most of the companies you have an account with already offer you tools to take control of your accounts’ security, even before you contact them for help, which in some cases you still should do.
Here we break down what you can do on several different online services.
Just like in the previous guide, there’s an important caveat. You should know that these methods don’t guarantee that you haven’t been compromised. If you still aren’t sure, you should contact a professional, especially if you are a journalist, a dissident or activist, or otherwise someone who has a higher risk of being targeted. In those cases, the nonprofit Access Now has a digital security helpline that will connect you to one of their experts.
Another caveat, if you don’t do this already, you should enable multi-factor authentication on all your accounts, or at least the most important ones (email, banking, social media). This directory is a great resource that teaches you how to enable multi-factor authentication on more than 1,000 websites. (Note that you don’t have to use the multi-factor app promoted on that site, there are plenty of other alternatives.)
Increasingly some online services offer the use of a physical security key or a passkey stored in your password manager, which is one of the highest safeguards to prevent account intrusions that rely on password-stealing malware or phishing.
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