The Secret to Consistent Clients | The Lead Generation Series

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, Episode 277

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income.

If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Hello, and welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, first of all, welcome, so glad to have you here. This podcast is for you if you are a creative freelancer, you offer freelance services, and you want to make more from your creative skills without selling your soul. That sounds like you're in the right spot for my returning listeners.

So glad to have you back.

Horrible week for me. I'm just going to be straight up with you. If you want to know why, let's talk about that for a second, then we'll get into what we're going to talk about on the show today, because y'all don't care about what problems I'm encountering here. It's been affecting my business in a very negative way, and I would love any insight from any people out there who can help me on this, please, to help me get past this horrible week.

On Friday, it's Tuesday right now, on Friday, my Facebook account was hacked again.

And before you judge me, let me just back up and say, this happened earlier in the year, and I talked about it in a previous episode. What happened? We found that one of my backup emails that was associated with my main account was compromised because it was an old account I never used anymore, blah. So when that happened, I took my security very seriously with my Facebook account because my whole business is tied to that with my Facebook business profile, and our ad accounts and everything are under my personal profile. So what I did to prevent this from ever happening again was I created a unique email address that I only used to log into Facebook. I create a 25 digit randomized password for that email address. I have two factor authentication turned on for that email address. And the only thing that email address is used for is to log into my personal Facebook page, right? So that email address is as secure as humanly possible, was not breached by the way. Also, for my Facebook account, randomized 25 digit password generated by one password.

I used two factor authentication for my Facebook account.

And despite all of that, someone still access my account on Friday. And I genuinely have no idea how they got into the account in the first place, how they bypassed my two factor authentication on my Facebook account, and changed my password, took my email address, my phone number off the account, switched it all over their own stuff, set up their own two factor authentication on the account. So even when I get the password reset and go through all that BS, I still can't log in, because they set up their own two factor authentication on my own account. It's been like five days since that happened, and it's been a whirlwind of me trying to get back into the account, submitting my passport and my ID to Meta or Facebook to get back in, and no luck. If any experts are out there to say, hey, Brian, this is probably what happened to your account and how it got hacked, please be my guest, send me an email, shoot me a reply in any email you ever get from me, and I would love to hear your input on how that happened.

The two theories are this. One is something called session hijacking. I was at a coffee shop working on the public Wi-Fi the day before this happened, something I've never heard of until I was researching what this could be. So that's one option of what it could be. I don't understand session hijacking other than they can essentially, through Wi-Fi, access and act like they're you on their browser. I don't know. I think they have to physically be in the coffee shop with me. So I don't think that happened. The second theory is some bizarre theory about how there's a security hole in Meta and somebody there understands it and knows it and is exploiting it and selling kits to hackers to exploit this. That's like a tinfoil hat theory, but I'm not the only one that's been affected by this. I've been obviously doing a bunch of research and there are tons of people, almost all of them are specifically people like me who advertise on Meta platforms. Our accounts are being targeted. So if you run ads through Meta, that's Instagram or Facebook or WhatsApp or whatever other properties they own, you could be at risk. And I don't know what else to tell you because I literally have better security set up on my Facebook account than I do my bank account. And the reason I can say that is because, yes, I have two-factor authentication turned on. Yes, I have crazy passwords that are unique to that specific site on everything. However, with my bank account, I don't even think I have a unique email address that I use just to log in to my bank account. So that's like one extra step of security that I took for Meta, and they still got past it. So I genuinely don't understand. But the problem with Meta is, even if I'm spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on ads, or I was, my accounts shut off now, even though that's the case, I still can't talk to a human being at Meta. So I'll keep you updated on what happens there, but that's been a horrible week for me because it's a huge part of my businesses. So after all of that, let's talk about the topic of the show today because whether or not you have access to your Meta account and you're locked out, or you're just a freelancer who's like, Brian, get on with the show. I don't care about your stupid problems, which is probably the majority of people. It's okay.