Beware, website hackers have more tricks up their sleeves

A couple of weeks ago Winnie Okeyo took a few minutes during her lunch break to log into her Facebook page and keep in touch with her friends.

She was accessing the site from her phone and thought it strange when she received the usual log in page instead of her home page since she had not logged out the last time she was on line.

She promptly typed her log in information but received an error message telling her she had input the wrong password.

She tried again but after several attempts to log in with the password she had been using since she joined Facebook, she gave up and blamed the hitch on her phone browser.

She later tried logging on from a cyber café and still could not access her account.

She thought the site was down but a look around the cyber café at other users gleefully Facebooking sent her into a panic.

“I tried to remember if I had changed my password but I could not recall ever doing that,” she says. “I had never shared my password with anyone and I thought I was losing my mind”.

Soon her friends started to receive inbox messages from her account.

“I was surprised when a few hours after my account mysteriously got locked one of my friends called me and told me she had received my inbox but could not make sense out of my message”, she said.

“I began getting calls from irritated friends asking me to stop filling their inboxes with spam”, she said. “I had a hard time explaining to them that I was not sending the messages and it was quite frustrating.” It soon became apparent to Winnie and her friends that her Facebook account had been hijacked.

Many Facebookers and Twiterers go about their social lives oblivious of the host of hackers and spammers eager to get hold of their accounts.

Over the last few years, the number of social media users has considerably increased .

Facebook recently announced it had hit the 500 million user mark an increase of 100 million users in five months.

But it is not only Mark Zukerberg and his team that were celebrating the milestone.

To the large underground hacking community, this news translates to 100 million new accounts to pilfer.