Should I just hire a hacker to recover my account?
Hi, everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com with a question that I honestly see too often.
Here's one example.
"I lost access to my Instagram account.
I keep seeing comments and ads for people
who offer to hack my account and give it back to me.
Are they legit? Do they work?
Should I try them?"
No, no, you should not.
Most are scams at a minimum.
They're illegal.
What most people don't understand is
that hackers really don't have access to anything more
than you and I have access to, which means that they're not bringing
anything to the table that you don't already have.
And you are the only person who can
legitimately and legally get back into your account.
I want to be clear. There's no such thing as good hacking.
I want to set aside the concept of ethical hacking,
because those are people that are hired by companies to intentionally break in.
But it's all above board.
It's all companies saying, show me where I've failed to have appropriate security.
That's what an ethical hacker does.
There's no such thing as an ethical hacker who will offer to recover an account
for you if you've lost your Instagram account.
You as a customer of Instagram, can't hire an ethical hacker.
That's not what an ethical hacker does.
Instagram could potentially hire a hacker
to what they call penetration test to their security measures.
But that's different. That's not what you're looking for.
That's not what's being offered.
Like I said, there is no magic back door.
When hackers do hack accounts, they use the same kind of techniques we've
been talking about for years phishing emails, malicious attachments,
bogus downloads, telephone and confidence scams, malware on your machine.
But the common thread with all those techniques of hacking is you.
You have access to your account
and the hacker is attempting to fool you into giving it to them.
If you don't have access to your account, the hacker has nobody to go after.
They just don't have a way of getting into that account.
They may claim to have ways, they may claim to have secret back doors
into Instagram servers or Gmail servers or Microsoft.
They don't.
They just don't.
One of the things I find myself doing
regularly on my YouTube channel is actually clearing comments from people
that claim to be able to hack back into accounts.
They can't. It's a scam.
So there are two scenarios for your account that you've lost your access to.
It's either in use or it's not.
If it's in use, it was hacked by somebody
and that somebody is a hacker who's unlikely to fall
for these schemes that the other hacker you might hire would try to use if,
in fact, they were going to do it anyway, if they weren't a scam.
So the fact that your account is actually
being used as a strike against you and of course, if the account isn't being
used, well, then there's no one for your hacker to hack.
Hackers don't hack software hackers hack people.
The things they did to hack your account in the first place had nothing to do
with your software and had everything to do with either fooling you or getting
malicious software down to an on your machine if there's nobody using
the account, if it's just sitting there out in cyberspace, completely unused.
There's nothing to do,
there's nobody to hack, there's no way that they can get your account back.
So how do you get your account back?
Well, I have to say it's possible.
You can't it's possible that you've lost your account forever.
That's something that's very important and critical to realize.
And I say that because it could save you a lot of time and effort.
The only legitimate way to regain access
to your account, be at Instagram or Facebook or Google or
Microsoft is to follow the account recovery procedures that they offer.
That's it.
Follow them completely,
follow them carefully, provide as much information as you possibly can.
If those work great, you've got your account back.
If they don't work, there is no other alternative.
Those are the ways to get the account back.
And if they don't work, you can't get your account back.
It's that brutally simple.
Now, you can stack the deck in your favor, but you have to prepare.
You have to do it before you lose your account.
And that's very simple.
Make sure you've got recovery email addresses and you keep them up to date
recovery phone numbers and you keep them up to date.
If you've got to factor, make sure that all of those settings are up to date.
Essentially,
make sure that all of the recovery information associated with your account
is current and is stuff that you still currently have access to,
that it all works in case you need it, because if it doesn't work when you do
need it, you could be severely out of luck.
For links, for more details, for comments and more,
visit Askleo.com/133759. I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.