Facebook Messenger accounts of some Indian users hacked in a money-related fraud

Some **Facebook** users in India on 4 October apparently reported that their **Messenger** was accessed wrongly and that their accounts were compromised by hackers to ask money from the user’s Facebook friends. As reported by The Times of India, this looks like a classic case of a phishing attack where a hacker makes a fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive data such as a username or a password. [caption id=“attachment_5292211” align=“alignnone” width=“1280”]  Representational image. Reuters[/caption] According to the report, users received notifications on their **WhatsApp** accounts from Facebook requesting a password change, upon doing which the account was then hacked. When the publication contacted the IT Ministry, they said that they would investigate the matter, and speak to Facebook about it. Facebook, on the other hand, denied commenting on the issue. Facebook was added as a contact on the users’ WhatsApp friend list, upon which they “received a notification which sent a ‘password reset code’ and a link to change login details.” Anyone who actually went ahead and reset their password basically handed over their password to the hackers who were running this scam. In case any of your friends have received messages asking for money or any untoward activity, which you don’t remember sending, then you probably need to reset your account password. Or at least report about this to Facebook. The news comes just a few days after **Facebook announced** that hackers had exposed personal information of nearly 50 million users.

To know whether your account was hacked, and what you can do to stay safe,  head here . To read out the three bugs that allowed hackers to compromise the Facebook accounts,  head here .