Browsing the web to the point where your social media accounts were hacked hacking happened the hacker was able to take over your digital life but how did he manage to do that he might have done one of these three things let's see what they each mean breaches believe me or not your password is probably already out there publicly available on the internet without even your knowledge this might feel a bit unconvincing but it's true that there is a chance even mine existed publicly on the internet without even me knowing it until recently when I finally found out that my credentials are already stolen and available for literally anyone to see I had to then change my password on all my websites immediately but how did this happen how is it that your credentials are already publicly available on the Internet this is because of data breaches when hackers managed to hack a website and get access to the websites database where the user information like their credentials are stored they leaked all this data on the Internet in most cases they sell this data on hacker forums and dark web or even post it on paste win it's the hackers choice of course this data contains the usernames and passwords of all or a part of the users of that web site so if you are a user of the website that got breached your data is leaked to most of the web sites hash your passwords before they store it in their database so a hacker needs to first crack your password hash in order to find your real password in plain text but I'm not saying that it is impossible to crack a password hash in fact most of the data breaches on the Internet contain plain text passwords many famous websites like Twitter Linkedin zero-zero-zero web host etc already suffered major data breaches and all these breaches are publicly available on the internet literally for anyone to see fun fact there is a bridge compilation available on the internet that contains literally 1.4 billion email password combinations think about it 1.4 billion if you want to check whether your credentials are included in any data breach you can go to have a beam punt calm and enter your email to search for any data that is associated with that particular email in any of the data breaches on the Internet but let me also tell you even though your results are positive on this side your data might still be in one of the breaches which is not popularly known but still exists this is the easiest way anyone can take over your social media accounts or online banking accounts or whatever it is recently many youtubers like Meghan drinks got their channels taken over by hackers because apparently their credentials already existed in a data breach the best way to stay safe from data breaches is to use a different password for every website use a password manager like - name to generate random unique passwords for every website you use social engineering this is literally you giving away your username and password it was stranger on the Internet hackers can pretend to be someone else to try to extract your crucial information like your credentials directly from you for example let's say you get a link like this from someone and this link claims that you can get Instagram likes instantly for free of cost you click on the link and you are taken to a very convincing website that claims to offer you free likes for your Instagram posts if you put in your Instagram presences on this website thinking that this is a legit website well your hacked this is called phishing it is one of the several types of social engineering attacks and it is also the most common technique hackers use now this is obviously not limited only to Instagram you may end up losing your other social media accounts email accounts or even your online banking accounts through social engineering however the way a hacker approaches you to perform is social engineering can vary and sometimes even if you are not a computer illiterate you may still fall for it a hacker can also install a rat on your device through social engineering a rat is nothing but a malware that gives the hacker remote access to your device by installing a rat the hacker will be able to do literally anything like stealing your credentials for different websites by using a key logger stealing your photos and videos finding your exact GPS location or even operating your device's camera or microphone without your knowledge for example look at this innocent SMS I received which claims that if I install this network carrier app and we get free Internet data I click on the link and download the apk it does look like the official app of the network provider well actually it is indeed the official app of the network provider but a rat is binded to this app by the hacker as soon as I install this on my device the hacker has complete access to my device I was recently targeted by someone and they tried hacking my YouTube channel through social engineering I've already made a video about it explaining what happened if you are interested you can watch the video by clicking the link in the description below man-in-the-middle attacks now this type of hacking is not very likely to occur but there is a chance that you can get hacked by man-in-the-middle attacks in this attack a hacker can put himself as the man in the middle between you and the Internet you are browsing let's say you are browsing internet from a public Wi-Fi network anyone who is using the same Wi-Fi network will be able to put themselves as the man in the middle and they can see your internet traffic or even modify it this means they will be able to see literally everything that you are sending and receiving from the Internet using that public Wi-Fi but as I said it is very unlikely to happen because most websites nowadays use HTTP connection which means the traffic between you and the web site is encrypted and no man in the middle will be able to extract this Internet traffic but you are still at risk if you are using a website that doesn't use HTTP over his TTP in such a case you may want to use a VPN to stay secure.
