Hackers devise new online tricks

Nneoma Okwuonu, a student of University of Uyo, got home from classes one afternoon, after an exhaustive marathon of lectures. Just as she was contemplating what to have for lunch, she heard a beep from her phone.

She opened the message, which turned out to be a notification from her friend on Facebook.

 The message asked her to click on a particular link and learn how to make fast money without stress.

 She clicked on the link, and was redirected to another website, where she signed up on the business portal to begin the process of making money.

Concerned about the welfare of her friends, she sent the link to them, so that they could also make the ‘cool cash’ which she was about to make. A few minutes later, she got a notification that her account had been compromised.

“A trusted friend sent a link to me, inviting me to click on it to make money. I was referring my friends on Facebook to ‘like’ and open the link too.

 After about two minutes, I saw a pop-up message on my screen which read: ‘Your Facebook account has been phished,” Okwuonu said.

“I could not access my account. The hacker barred me from using it till date, and the worst is that he is still manipulating that account,” she stated.

For Light Nwankwo, who is a marketing executive with a bank in Port Harcourt, he woke up one morning to see an unusual electronic mail message from his uncle, asking him to lend him some money.

Nwankwo said, “I got an electronic message from my uncle, Augustine Udeh, saying he had a car waiting at the wharf for clearance and needed about $1000 to clear it.

 Knowing that he could not ask me for such, I called him to tell him that his account had been hacked. He had to change the password, but almost immediately, they gained access to it again and sent viral messages to all his contacts.”

Udeh, who was a former top  government employee, risked having his information and government secrets  divulged to the hackers.

According to a social media expert, Femi Lawore, social network accounts are mostly hacked through phishing

.

“Victims get a mail or a post on their walls telling them to view something of interest on social media through a link.

 When they click on the link, it tells them to sign into their social network account or a social media application. Usually, these links do not lead to the real social media page.

  When they submit their social network login credentials, they are submitting it to hackers.

“Another popular way to have social media accounts hacked is to use unsecured Internet connections or computers (virus or malware infected computers).

 Through this, hackers can hijack sessions and even lock the user out or change their passwords, sniff unencrypted passwords and have it sent to them through that same system, unknown to the computer user,” he said.