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Can you recall every online service account you have? Maybe you signed up to access some content or because a friend asked you to, then lost interest. Many users simply stop logging in and don’t bother to delete their accounts. The accounts sit there, dormant, waiting to be hacked — but if they are, you won’t know about it anytime soon, if ever.

Abandoned account: What could go wrong

Does it really matter what happens to an unwanted profile, though? If it gets hacked, so what? You didn’t need it anyway. However, in some cases, an abandoned account can be exploited to gain access to resources and important information that you do need. Here’s what you need to know.

1. Social network accounts

Few people regularly check their accounts in all of their social networks. Say, for example, a person creates a Facebook profile, uses it to log in to Instagram and other services (handy, right?), and then realizes he doesn’t actually need Facebook — not an uncommon scenario. Sure, the social network continues to send e-mail notifications if the user didn’t bother to disable them, but they get filtered into a separate folder that he quit checking long ago.

Again, a more-than-plausible scenario. When the user receives an e-mail warning that someone logged into his account from an unknown device, he doesn’t see it. The cybercriminals who logged in have a free shot at the accounts linked to Facebook. They will also probably have time to sting some of the victim’s friends or followers on Facebook.

What to do

1. Set up two-factor authentication. Lots of services offer it; here are our posts on setting up security, including 2FA, in Facebook and Twitter.

2. Enable notifications about account logins from unknown devices — and pay attention to them.

2. Backup e-mail address

Many people set up a separate e-mail account for mailings and notifications so as not to clutter up their main mailbox, and use it for registering everything and anything, including profiles with important data. And no incoming e-mails there are from real-life people, so they don’t check it very often. Therefore, they may not notice for a long time that their backup e-mail has been hacked — at least not until they lose access to a very important account.

What to do

1. Enable two-factor authentication for this account.

2. Set up forwarding of messages from this mailbox to a separate folder in your primary e-mail account.
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