What would happen if someone hacked into your LinkedIn account, changed all of your account login information and then changed your picture, name and background information and replaced it with false information in order to have access to your network connections.
Sound far fetched, well it’s not, this happened to one of my connections recently, he was effectively locked out of his own LinkedIn profile.
I thought for a moment, what would I do if this happened to me, I generate almost 70% of my business through my LinkedIn account, this would be devastating for my business.
Here are two things I would recommend that you do, firstly every month I would recommend capturing a download of your LinkedIn profile and any changes that have occurred. Using LinkedIn’s save my profile to PDF Feature. If you go into Edit Profile and then click on the small grey drop down arrow next to the blue ‘View Profile’ button, a drop down selection menu will appear and you will be given the option to ‘Save to PDF’. (See picture below)
This allows you to save your profile to PDF, if you were ever to lose your profile, you would at least have a screen capture of everything that was contained in your profile.
I would also recommend periodically requesting a data archive of your LinkedIn activity. In the ‘Account Settings’ area of LinkedIn, included in this archive download is an excel list of your connections, which would also be invaluable, should you ever need to call on it.
These are steps that will help you recover, should you not be able to regain access to your account and have to start all over again.
But there are steps that you can take to prevent it happening in the first place, one great step is to take advantage of LinkedIn’s two step verification process and secure connection features.
The two step verification process allows you to through your smart phone verify devices to LinkedIn and then when someone tries to log in through an un-verified device or location, they will be challenged to enter a ‘smart code’ which will have been sent to your smartphone.
The secure connection feature only allows access through secure network connections.
I would highly recommend anyone using LinkedIn for business to take advantage of these free additional security features.
Follow the link below.
https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/544/
