Here's What to Do If Your Facebook Account Is Hacked

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Impact

Having your Facebook account hacked is a potentially horrifying experience, whether someone is logging in to your profile and making purchases, posting statuses or looking at your private stuff. Luckily there are a number of steps you can take.

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Facebook itself offers tips for users who think (or know) that their profiles were hacked on the site's "Help Center." This includes an option to report a compromised account and "regain control" of the profile in question. Similar options exist if a page, not a personal profile, has been hacked.

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If you suspect your account has been hacked but you're not sure, one way to check is to look at your profile's "Activity Log," which shows all the recent activity from your Facebook account. If there's activity you don't recognize, it might be a good idea to report your account as compromised.

Some of the best ways to protect your profile, according to Facebook's official security tips, are to keep your password private and not give it out to friends or family, to run anti-virus software on your computer and log out of your Facebook account every time you use a shared computer. For added security, Facebook gives users the option to turn on a feature called "login approvals," which requires a code that's texted to your phone every time you log in to Facebook from a new computer.

Social media profiles are more and more connected to our real lives, so stay safe out there, people!