How To Find Out If You Have Been Hacked By Linked In; What To Do
The year 2021 appears to be the year of data breaches. In recent months, we've witnessed many large data breaches, with attackers targeting brands such as Facebook, Air India, and Dominos.
LinkedIn user data has been compromised yet again, probably due to the same vulnerability that resulted in the data breach of about 500 million members earlier this year.
This year, LinkedIn suffered its second major data breach, affecting an estimated 700 million users.
Hackers have also gone ahead and sold their data on the dark web, which includes private information such as phone numbers, physical locations, geolocation data, and salary estimates.
The hacker has supplied a sample of one million records, which has been verified as genuine and up to date. There are no passwords, dates of birth, or financial information on it. It's a great place to start if you're looking for a way to steal your identity or launch a highly targeted phishing assault.
What to do if you're a victim of the LinkedIn hack
To begin, log in to LinkedIn and change your password. It may be useful in preventing brute-force password attempts on your LinkedIn account. To minimize what the general public can see, you should evaluate your privacy settings.
Go to Have I Been Pwned for the second step. You may enter your email address safely to discover if it's in any Dark Web databases. If your email is there, change your password right away and on a frequent basis. Go to the password tab to check if your password is secure. Third, be extremely wary about phishing scams. If you're not sure if an email is real, don't open any attachments or click any links.
These five actions can help you keep your personal digital life safe and secure. Constant attentiveness is the key. While none of the suggestions below are foolproof, they can help you keep the bad guys out of your life and social media accounts. If you follow these similar security precautions at work, your organization will be considerably more resistant to hackers.
Here are some suggestions for safeguarding your personal information:
Always keep an eye out for hackers
Situational awareness is the first step towards staying safe. All emails, text messages, phone conversations, and other forms of communication should be treated with caution and suspicion. Hackers and scammers use a variety of techniques to appear authentic. Most of their techniques, on the other hand, rely on fear, confusion, and doubt to persuade you to do something urgent that may jeopardize the security of your gadgets, accounts, or wallet.
Use a Different Password Everywhere
Surprisingly, 81per cent of data breaches are caused by passwords that aren't secure. If you use the same password for all or most of your accounts, you're vulnerable to a technique known as "credential stuffing." Hackers will gather credentials discovered in previous data breaches and perform mass automated login attempts to obtain access to your other accounts and services that use the same or similar passwords.
Multi Factor Authentication should be used everywhere
Two-factor authentication (often known as 2FA) is a security feature that can significantly improve your defense against hackers. You are only asked for your username and password when you log in to your bank. You will be granted access if you enter this correctly. This is known as "1-factor authentication," because you just provide the bank with one "factor" when logging in. Hackers can quickly guess or steal a username and password since it is "something you know."
Update all of your software on a regular basis
Hackers adore exploiting security flaws in software products like Adobe Acrobat Reader, Java, Microsoft Office, Chrome, and Firefox that are installed on your devices. They also target security flaws in your device's operating system, such as Windows 10, Mac OS X, Apple iOS, and Google Android. Because a hacker exploited a security flaw in one of these programs, they might remotely access your computer via the Internet and take complete control of it without you having to do anything. They'd be able to access your sensitive files and accounts, as well as whatever else you can do on the computer.
Use caution when sharing information on the internet
Information is a preferred weapon of hackers and social engineers. This contains information about you, including what you're doing, where you're going, your hobbies, what you like to eat, who your family and friends are, and what events are now taking place in your life. Hackers can use the information you disclose on the internet to target you at home. The solution to this problem is simple. Reduce the amount of information you share about your personal and professional life as much as possible. Do not make information available to the general public or on social media. Don't go overboard with your sharing. It's impossible to tell who is listening, watching, or plotting an attack.
