Facebook Page Hacked: How Do You Recover and Rebuild?

It’s not common, but when it happens, it can be devastating. You go to log in to your Facebook page one day, only to be confronted with a “password incorrect” message. You carefully type it again, and the same thing happens. Try as you might, you can’t log in to your account.

You go to visit your Facebook page and, sure enough, it’s no longer under your control. There are public posts about how the page is under new management. There’s a post pinned to the top, asking if anyone wants to buy the page. Or there’s nothing; everything deleted, everything removed.

Maybe you found out yourself. Maybe one of your page admins discovered they were removed and are asking you why, when you didn’t remove them yourself. Whatever the case, your page has been hacked. How can you get it back?

Facebook Preventative Measures

First of all, if you haven’t been hacked yet, there’s still time to take action to protect your account. There are a few things you can do.

• Make sure your password is long, unique and secure. Don’t save it in your browser. Don’t store it in a file on your computer. Don’t write it down on a piece of paper in your wallet. Memorize it, or use a third party service like LastPass as a password manager.
• Use a login approval. You can turn this feature on by clicking security settings and turning on login approvals. This is essentially two-factor authentication. When you want to log in, Facebook will send a message to your mobile device, asking for a code in that message. You have to put in the code in order to log in.
• Turn on login notifications. These are messages sent to you when you log in from a new location. It can be annoying if you’re frequently traveling, but it can be a life saver if you notice a login from a location you definitely haven’t been to.
• Set up trusted contacts. This essentially allows you to flag a few friend accounts as people you trust. If your Facebook page is ever compromised, you can use verification through these trusted contacts as a way to get your account back. This works because Facebook assumes that anyone hacking you hasn’t also hacked all of your friends.

Additionally, make sure other avenues of compromise are secure as well. Email is the big one; someone with the email account tied to your Facebook page can just reset your settings and use confirmation through your email account. Email providers often offer services like two-factor authentication just like Facebook, so make sure to turn those on. It can be a hassle, but recovering from a hacked page is so much worse.

The Stakes

You stand to lose a lot if your Facebook page is hacked. On Facebook itself, you can lose your contact list and information. You can lose your friend and fan connections. You can lose group memberships and private pages. You can lose the admin role in groups, or even have groups closed. You lose tags in photos, you lose your custom URL, and more.

Beyond that, you lose business. People trust you less when your page is compromised. People don’t want to do business with someone who might lose their information. There’s also the downtime while you recover; you’re not running ads or selling products when your page is down.

Even worse, if your password wasn’t very secure, the hacker may be able to compromise other accounts, like your email, Twitter or even your website. It’s all very dangerous.

Recovering from a Hacking

Once you’ve discovered that your page has been hacked, the first thing to do is visit the “report a hacked page” field on Facebook. The one problem with this is that it requires you to log in to see the page, which can be impossible if your entire account was compromised and you’ve lost the ability to log in.

If you can’t log in to use these contact forms, you will need to contact Facebook through one of their non-account-related messaging systems.

• Send a message to their Security page.
• Get friends to report your page by visiting it and reporting the posts it makes.
• Dig out whatever phone number Facebook is using these days and give them a call.

It will be a long and traumatic process to recover your page. Unfortunately, if you’re a small business with under 1,000 likes, Facebook is probably going to assign you a somewhat lower priority than they otherwise might. This has nothing to do with the quality of your business; Facebook just wants to fix the biggest issues it can first. It might take days or weeks to get control of your page back.

Recovering from a Hacked Facebook Page

When Facebook finally restores your Page to you, you need to go into overdrive to fix the problems, recover your data and restore your page to a functional state.

• DO NOT immediately reset your password. Why? It’s possible that the hacker changed the email associated with your account. If you go to reset your password, the hacker gets the password reset email, and all they have to do is click a link to reset the password. You lose control over your page again and have to go through the whole process over.
• Instead, check for any odd contact information added to your account. Remove any emails or phone numbers you don’t recognize. You don’t want the hacker to have an in with your account.
• Check to make sure you’re not logged in on another location. A hacker may have saved your login information and stayed logged in, even if you change your information. Click the settings menu, click security, and click “where you’re logged in.” If there’s any session there you don’t like, end the activity. This will forcibly log out your account on any device you don’t want to be using.
• Once you’re sure contact information is secure, then you can reset your password. Make sure your password is strong, preferably a long password with a mixture of letters, numbers and special characters.
• Implement an app password. To do this, you need to turn on login approvals, as mentioned in the first section of this article. Once you have that enabled, you can go back to security settings and click to turn on app passwords. This puts specific one-time passwords on your app usage.
• Add login approvals, one-time passwords and trusted contacts, as mentioned above.
• Make sure other accounts, like your email account, are secure. You don’t want other parts of your business to fall victim while you’re fighting with Facebook.
• Run antivirus software. Sometimes the compromise comes from a virus monitoring your actions. Remove any malware you discover on your computer.

Additionally, there are some maintenance and upkeep operations to perform before you’re back at full strength.

• Scan your public wall for posts or comments you didn’t want to make and remove them. This can involve spam or malware links, among other things.
• Make a post explaining the situation and assuring users that you are back in control and that no personal information was lost.
• Check your private messages to make sure you didn’t send anything out to your followers directly, and if you did, message them to apologize, perhaps offering them a coupon or something as compensation for the hassle.
• Visit your purchase history to check for any purchases made with financial information you have added to Facebook. If there is anything you don’t recognize, contact Facebook and report it.
• Check your ads account to make sure no one made any purchases or ran any ads while you were compromised. Most hackers don’t bother with this, but you might find an ambitious hacker hoping you never check your ads. Make sure any ad destinations have not been changed and that you’re not running ads you don’t want to run.
• If you had credit card information tied to Facebook, contact your bank or financial institution to have your card cancelled and a new one issued. If any purchases were made, dispute them.

It’s a huge hassle, but you need to make sure you’re as secure as possible moving forward. A hacking is a serious problem, and can hurt your business in more ways than one.

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