How to prevent your LinkedIn account from getting hacked

Use 2FA on LinkedIn to stay safe from hackers

Like other social media platforms, Microsoft’s social networking platform LinkedIn is also highly targeted by hackers. One of the ways a hacker uses to take control of your LinkedIn account (locking you out of it) is by sending a connection request.

You get a notification that someone has sent you a LinkedIn connection request. Just to know who this unknown person is, you tap on their LinkedIn profile. Once it opens, you see that the LinkedIn profile looks legit, with a clear and professional profile picture, the place where the person is located, the name of their alma mater, the current job they are in and several meaningful LinkedIn posts. In short, everything about the LinkedIn profile looks perfectly fine.

You accept the LinkedIn connection request and sometime later, are horrified to find that you have, somehow, been logged out of your LinkedIn account and can’t log in only. Earlier, you didn’t care about switching on two-factor authentication (2FA) on LinkedIn and now a cybercriminal has taken control of your LinkedIn account.

What the hacker did was retrieve your login information somehow and use it to login and change the password. Now, they’ll change all the professional details on your profile, keep or erase your contacts and worse, start sending weird messages to others from your profile to trap more people since yours is a perfectly legit LinkedIn profile. Others won’t suspect, just like you didn’t. How to keep your LinkedIn account secure, then? Here’s when the importance of two-factor authentication (2FA) couldn’t be more clearer.

Simply switching on the two-factor authentication on LinkedIn could save your LinkedIn profile from common hacking attempts. Here, we give you the steps to turn on two-factor authentication (2FA) via the LinkedIn app:

1. Open the LinkedIn app on your phone and go to your LinkedIn feed. Next, tap your profile picture in the top left corner.
2. In the sidebar that slides in from the left, find ‘Settings’ at the bottom and click/tap it.
3. Go to ‘Sign in & security’.
4. Click/tap on ‘Two-step verification’ and toggle it to On. Choose how you would like to get the verification code. That's it. Now you have enabled two-factor authentication on LinkedIn

What to do if your LinkedIn account gets hacked?

If you are using LinkedIn without enabling 2FA and your account gets hacked, you won’t be able to login to your account only, forget about going to settings and turning on 2FA later. Should that happen (or has happened recently) and a stranger takes control of your LinkedIn account, contact LinkedIn support using this link and create a support ticket.

https://www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin/solve

You don’t have to be logged in to your LinkedIn account to create the support ticket. You can do it from any device.