Many don’t realize how much personal information is available online in our various social media accounts. Everything from passwords, email addresses and phone numbers of contacts and more can be found if someone is looking hard enough. One way to do that is to take over someone’s social media account. In this case, it was Skype and French developer Jean-Pierre Lesueur whose Skype account was stolen from him. Skype is a social media type site that provides online phone calls, video chats and gaming for your personal computer.
Lesueur discusses this Skype-swiping experience in his blog. Microsoft sent him an email telling him that his Skype account password had been reset. He knew that he wasn’t the one who asked for the password to be reset. After hacking the account, Lesueur says, the person responsible messaged all of his contacts with a request for money. This has happened before with many social media sites including MySpace, FaceBook and Twitter. In this case, Lesueur was fortunate because he had the contact information for the responsible party who then dropped his efforts to collect funds from the recipients of the sent messages.
There is a probable danger that a hacker will ask your contacts (friends, family, business clients, and more) for money. It’s possible that the purpose of hacking the account is to gain a foothold for inserting a malware virus into your computer. These viruses can record, save and send the passwords of your other sites to the hacker, who will come back into your computer later and hit your bank account or other accounts. How did the hacker do it? He knew his target’s email address and a few of the contacts in that Skype account and the billing email address as well. Skype customer service did it for him.
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