How to Tell If Your Facebook Account Has Been Hacked (and What to Do About It)

Every week I get a message that starts the same way: “something feels off with my Facebook, but I can’t put my finger on it.” Almost every time, that feeling turns out to be right. Here’s what to actually look for, and what to do about it before it gets worse.

The signs people miss

Hacked accounts don’t usually announce themselves. Nobody posts “I’ve been hacked” for you in big red letters. The real tells are smaller, and easy to write off as nothing: a login notification from a city you’ve never visited, a friend mentioning a message you don’t remember sending, a sudden flurry of “liked” posts you didn’t like, or your name or profile photo changing by something small. Any one of these on its own might be nothing. Two together, almost never.

If something feels slightly wrong with your account, trust that feeling before you trust the login page.

People usually wait to be sure before doing anything. With a hacked account, waiting is the expensive part: every hour it sits open is another hour someone else can use it.

What to do in the first ten minutes

Speed matters more than precision here. You don’t need to work out how it happened today. You need to lock the door.

• Change your password immediately, from a device you trust, before doing anything else.
• Turn on two-factor authentication if it isn’t already on: this is the single biggest difference between a scare and a disaster.
• Check Settings → Security and Login for sessions you don’t recognise, and log them out.
• Tell a couple of close contacts what happened, in case messages have already gone out in your name.
• Report the account to Facebook as compromised: it fast-tracks recovery if things go further.

None of this needs a computer science degree, just five minutes and a bit of urgency. If you’ve worked through the list and something still feels wrong, or you’re not sure what you’re looking at, send me what you’re seeing before you click anything else. That’s exactly the kind of question this blog (and this business) exists for.