Social Media accounts used for log ins and being hacked/account suspended

How many of us have a log in that we use from a social media site? I’m talking about the ones that you go to log in to a site and it says you must have an account, but can use your Facebook, Google+, YouTube (to name a few) accounts to log into their systems. It’s fairly common place now to just say use one of the social media accounts you have to log in and leave a message or use it as a log in.

Have you ever thought about what it would like if, by using this account, you are reported for misconduct and you hadn’t done anything wrong? How hard do you think it would be to get your account reinstated before you miss important information from either your friends and family or, in the case of business, how many deals or communication instructions you would miss because of this “mistake” that someone has falsely accused you of?

What would you do your accounts were accessed?

Until reading an article recently, I never even thought of what I would do if this happened. It could happen too as today any accounts can be hacked into and recently have been. For instance, at least once a month I read on my Facebook account how friends and family are getting hacked into. Think its only that? Then how about the conversations groups that are in places like Yahoo! which are constantly hacked into? Then you have places like your Microsoft and Apple accounts. I know I hear almost monthly (in the last 6 months) about my husband’s account being prompted about someone trying to change his Apple password. The only reason this has stopped is because, after taking out all details, he changed his password to something that is so long I’m not sure HE’LL remember it.

What if your account is report and shut down?

Now think of your account, any account, you use for commenting on any site. What would you do if the account was reported and it was shut down? Could you live without it or would it severely impact on your life? Honestly, if this was me, most of my accounts wouldn’t bother me. However, my Facebook and Skype would impact on my life as these I use pretty heavily. The only other accounts that would bother me would be my blog sites as I try to stay as updated weekly on these. In fact, not long after I started this blog, the computer picked up a link that I used which was on an internal banned site and it closed the blog. I had no idea what happened and didn’t know about this internal banned site list. If anything this really annoyed me as this list should be made available so people know about it. After some explaining about happened and some other talk about what was wrong and what to do, this site was brought back online. Again, I did nothing intentionally wrong, but it was brought down beyond my control. Since then, the users to the blog have never rebounded. I can hear you ask or state – I bet the site was down for days so of course it was going to impact on it. Wrong, the site was down for less than a day – it was only down for less than an hour before I contacted the people who run WordPress, but because of the time difference, it wasn’t back up until about 12 hours later. In fact, I was in bed when I got the email stating what I did wrong came in and I got up in the early morning hours and fixed it so the post would go through, so it was only hours the site was down. If you think I’m the only one then look at this.

One Social Media account affects others

Thankfully the account I’ve described above, only affected one account. Mashable recently published a story about Michael Janitch who had someone anonymously flagged his Google+ account and had all of his accounts that use that log in went down. This meant things like Blogger, Google+, Hangouts, and most of all his Gmail. Please read the article as it’s an interesting read about these types of accounts.

I try to limit the accounts that are linked and these are the reasons why (listed in this article). It’s great to have things linked, but if they all go down? Well there will be hell to pay because I’m on that many sites, I wouldn’t know which way to look first if I linked them all. I’m a cautious person overall, but most of today’s younger generations are not this way and sometimes they will pay for being that way or they might just have the luck which will see them slip through, but more than likely I’d say people will get caught in this.

What would you do if this happened? Would it mean the end of the world for you, an inconvenience or could you live without? I believe it depends on which account is affected and your usage of that account. Has this happened to you? If so, has it been done more than once? Let me know.

Update: Dec 4, 2013 – Another breach for Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and other Social Media sites. For more information please see this article about it.